Microsoft is making its collaboration platform more developer-friendly as a place to host apps and a place to build them.
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Microsoft is, at heart, a platform company. Once a product gets big enough (millions of users across thousands of businesses), it becomes a place where we can build applications. We’ve seen it with Microsoft Office, Visual Studio, Dynamics, and more. Probably the fastest transition from product to platform was Teams, quickly becoming a host for workflow endpoints and quick interactions with line-of-business systems before gaining its own developer tools.
Since then, Teams has quickly added new extension points, allowing a mix of different application types and services, including Microsoft’s own extensions like its Bookings service. Developers can use Teams along with Microsoft 365’s Graph services to integrate with other parts of its productivity suite, using Teams as an additional user interface.
Building Teams into your user-facing applications allows those applications …