Microsoft Updates Teams with App Integrations and Storefront
The software giant is adding a host of new functionalities to its Teams group collaboration suite, which first launched in March.
Microsoft on Monday added a bevy of new features to its Teams collaboration tool, which competes with Facebook for Work, Slack, Cisco Systems' Spark and other collaboration tools. The software giant has made integrations with applications tighter, added in a new application storefront and allowed users to command apps more directly.
In a company blog post, Microsoft called the release of the new features "the biggest single release of new functionality since Teams launched last March."
Here are some of the major updates:
- Users can now have a conversation about content from an app (Office apps like Excel and partners, including Trello, InVision and SurveyMonkey) without needing to include a screenshot or a hyperlink to the information.
- A new personal view of apps gives users easy access to the apps they care about and see all the items that they have been assigned to across apps.
- Who, a new app powered by the Microsoft Graph, lets users search for people in their organization by name or topic.
- A new app store allows users search for apps by name, category (such as Project management or Analytics and BI), or integration type (such as Bots, Tabs, or Connectors).
- Users now have the ability to query or command an app right from the command box. Microsoft has integrated commanding with search and moved the command box to the top of the screen, which lets users command apps and take quick actions right from the box, in addition to searching across people, messages, files and apps.
