When introducing Microsoft Teams the product group at Microsoft gave some development guidelines very early on. People should understand how to extend the client with their own services and addons. This article sums up the available options and tries to cluster them into different classes of use cases to put that into a nice and handy infographic.
This is the English translation of the corresponding former published German article as it was requested from several people. Hope it helps someone out there.
I am still not completely used to the fact that Microsoft focusses on open standards and common development technologies nowadays. So it might be helpful to remind yourself that this is also the case for the Teams development story. Although using Azure makes things very easy, you can use whatever you want for hosting or dev purposes.
Infographic für Microsoft Teams development
The infographic shows the situation as it is in November 2017. You should keep in mind that the client itself is still very young compared with the other ones in Office 365. So, there is a lot of development here, the product group is constantly improving the product. This means this infographic will evolve over time, I’ll try to keep this up to date. If you find any errors or out-of-date-information I’ll be happy to get this feedback from your side.
The graphic may be used by you in any way but please be fair and just leave the source information in if you do so.
The toolset referenced in this infographic
The infographic shows several tools that are used for the shown use cases. In most cases these are well-known resources for common development. Also, you should be familiar with the whole toolset of Azure when talking about developing for Teams.
Nevertheless, I want to emphasize one special tool that was created by Wictor Wilen and some folks of the community. The Yeoman Generator is a great tool to start easily developing for Microsoft Teams because it uses the simple approach of yo to get your project up and running. So simply hammer „yo teams“ into your console and let the fun begin.
Updates
As soon as the next big change will happen to the development story of Microsoft Teams I will update the infographic accordingly at this place. Especially as soon as the API possibilities in the Graph API will become „official“ (at least more official as the current beta state) some new interesting options should pop up.
There is still much left to be desired when talking about extensibility. But the product team announced much stuff coming around in the next year, so let’s keep an eye on that.
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