Microsoft announced at its 2017 Build developer conference that any developer can now publish apps for Microsoft Teams, the company’s work messaging platform in Office 365 and competitor to Slack.
Additionally, the company states that apps in Teams will soon be more discoverable with the imminent launch of a new “app experience.”
Developers can also now add new capabilities to Teams apps, such as third-party notifications in the activity feed, ‘Compose Extensions’ and ‘Actionable Messages.’
Microsoft Teams launched in March 2017, taking on dominant team chat platform Slack. One of its main selling points over Slack is its seamless integration of Microsoft services included in the company’s Office 365 package, like Excel and Word.
So far, the list of third-party integrations on Teams is far from extensive, but includes GitHub, Asana, Trello and Hootsuite. With this announcement, Microsoft is taking a step towards increasing the number of apps and integrations on its budding platform — though, ultimately, the amount of new apps will depend on uptake by developers.
