Microsoft Teams Now Generally Available to Office 365 Customers Worldwide

Microsoft Teams team

Today, we announced that Microsoft Teams, the chat-based workspace in Office 365, is now generally available in 181 markets and in 19 languages.  Since announcing the Preview in November, more than 50,000 organizations have started using Teams, including Alaska Airlines, Conoco Phillips, Deloitte, Expedia, J.B. Hunt, J. Walter Thompson, Hendrick Motorsports, Trek Bicycle and Three UK.

With 85 million monthly active users, Office 365 empowers individuals, teams and entire organizations with the broadest and deepest toolkit for collaboration on the market.  As the latest addition to that toolkit, Teams provides an exciting new opportunity to reach end users with your apps and services.  Take advantage of the  Microsoft Teams developer platform and get started today.

Microsoft Teams is built to be customizable to meet the unique needs of every team.  This means making it easy to use the tools and resources they depend on right within Teams.  More than 150 integrations are available or coming soon, including bots from Hipmunk, Growbot and ModuleQ; and tabs from Wrike, Smartsheet and Sapho.  We’re also partnering with SAP SuccessFactors and Trello to build new integrations that let users bring important apps and services into Microsoft Teams, truly making it their own hub for teamwork.

Of course, a rich developer platform and capabilities are core to building integrations that teams love and make getting work done easy.  In February, we added ‘bots in channels’ and ‘deep link to items in a tab’ to our developer platform.  Today’s release introduces these new features:

  • Bots can now @mention users. Your bot can call out specific users, or even @mention the entire channel, to call attention to important events generated by your experience. 
  • The new Invoke action type allows you to create a silent call-back from a user to your bot, via a button press or card tap. This allows your bot to receive messages – confirmation or item selection – in a schema you define, allowing much more control in message handling than the current imBack action supports.
  • New conversation update events like teamMemberAdded and channelCreated allow your bot to keep track of the events happening within the teams they have been added to.
  • A brand-new side loading process allows you to easily add both bots and tabs to your team, with a consolidated manifest format that supports bots and tabs in a single package.
  • We’ve also added the ability to pin a tab to your bot conversation view. For example, imagine a task management bot with a tab containing a list of the user’s assigned tasks.

We will continue to evolve developer capabilities and incorporate feedback from our developer community.  We’ll have more to share at our annual developer conference, Microsoft Build, so stay tuned.

Sign up for the Microsoft Office 365 Developer Program for access to the Office 365 developer subscription and Microsoft Teams to start building your integrations.

Richard  Moe, Microsoft Teams Developer Community Manager

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