Today, we’re excited to announce new meetings extensibility points that will enable developers to expand the Teams meeting experience. With this new capability, developers will be able to build apps or integrate their existing ones within the meeting surface and provide a richer collaboration experiences for users across the entire meeting lifecycle – covering events and actions from before, during, and after a meeting. These new extensibility points will be available soon for developer preview over coming weeks.
Empowering developers with new meetings surfaces
Until today, developers could integrate their Teams apps within the constructs of channels, 1:1 chats, and group chats – but not meetings. Now, these new meetings extensibility points provide an opportunity to enable their apps within the scope of a meeting as tabs, in new surface areas like the app panel, through in-meeting app signals for notifications, and access to critical APIs to enable powerful app experiences. Developers will be able to enable these capabilities by configuring their Teams app to be available in meeting scope within their app manifest.
Enabling richer collaboration experiences across the meetings lifecycle
Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork and with these new meetings extensibility points, developers will be able to enable richer collaboration experiences across the meetings lifecycle. End users will enjoy an enhanced end-to-end meetings experience as they go from scheduling the meeting to attending the meeting to collaborate with meeting attendees after. Below are a few examples of the possibilities with these extensibilities.
Before meeting experiences
Users will be able to add Teams apps during meeting set up. Through the “roles” API, developers will be able to configure their apps to tailor the experience based on the user’s role/persona (e.g., presenter, attendee, guest, anonymous).
During meeting experiences
Developers will be able to design how their Teams app uses the app panel (right pane) within a meeting. They can build experiences integrating tools such as adaptive cards, HTML, and other platform capabilities to create an engaging surface for users to interact with. Again, developers can configure how their apps will behave based on the specific roles/personas in the meeting. The apps themselves will be visible from the meeting tool bar to host tabs.
Another capability that developers will be able to take advantage of are through in-meeting notifications (content bubbles), where the app will be able to surface important content to the users based on their role/persona.
After meeting experience
The benefit of these new meetings extensibility points is that, like today, end users will have benefit of having their apps persist within this meetings surface to continue to use and draw back upon for further collaboration.
Consistent level of administrative controls and management
While these new extensibility points provide new sets of capabilities for developers, IT administrators can remain confident and leverage their existing toolset to manage Teams apps that integrate in meetings. They’ll continue to have the same controls, tools, and policies to ensure enterprise grade security, manageability, and trust.
Unlocking meetings scenarios together with our Partners
Meetings extensibility has been a highly requested from both our customers and partners for good reason. There are numerous scenarios across lines of business, industries, and competencies where these extensibility points will unlock opportunities to enhance collaboration and productivity. We’re excited to announce that several of our key partners, including Polly, Open Agora, Miro, iCIMS, and HireVue are integrating these new capabilities in their Teams apps at the time of our anticipated general availability launch later this year – unlocking new scenarios and experiences for Teams users to interact with their apps across the meeting lifecycle.
Polly and Open Agora are apps that allow users to create and distribute polls and surveys to gather data easily for real-time insight and analysis. With the new meetings extensibility points, these partners will be able to build more integrated polling/surveying experiences directly within the scope of meetings.
Miro provides users a virtual whiteboard for visual brainstorming and organization. With the new meetings extensibility points, users will be able to enable these apps across the entire meetings lifecycle for whiteboarding before, during, and after meetings.
iCIMS and HireVue are talent acquisition and interviewing platforms that provide organizations end-to-end recruiting, interviewing, and hiring solutions. With the new meetings extensibility points, users using these Teams apps will be able streamline and enrich the candidate hiring experience, such as entering interview feedback directly while facilitating virtual interviews.
Design, build, and expand new meeting experiences
We are excited to provide our partners and developers these new meeting extensibility points. As we roll out the developer preview over the coming weeks, we invite you to begin integrating your apps with these new extensibility capabilities and we look forward to collecting your feedback to help us improve. General availability is expected later this year.
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