What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a behemoth of a product that allows users to collaborate with teammates, communicate, share files, work on projects, and many other capabilities. True to the name of the service, it allows end-users who may be located in different geographic regions worldwide to communicate and function as a team effectively. One of the tremendous selling points of Microsoft Teams is the ability to consolidate and have all the tools that users need in a single location. Historically, many businesses may have a chat application, a video conferencing solution, a document-sharing platform, a file repository, and other individual services that make up their portfolio of productivity tools. Microsoft Teams allows organizations to consolidate these productivity tools and services into the Teams platform as it provides all of the capabilities mentioned above natively. In addition, it drastically streamlines productivity workflows as users do not have to leave the Teams app to do what they need to do. Take note of the Microsoft Teams services:- Chat
- Voice calls
- Video conferencing
- File sharing
- Shared calendars
- Internal Wikis
- Others
Microsoft Teams has over 320 million monthly active users
Microsoft Teams App Integrations to Boost Your Team Productivity
The Microsoft Teams architecture allows the integration of various tools, applications, services, and other third-party solutions into the Microsoft Teams ecosystem. The Teams integrations are arguably one of the platform’s hidden gems and enable organizations to integrate different productivity workflows into their Teams environment seamlessly. Due to the explosive popularity of Microsoft Teams, third-party app developers are generally developing “Teams-integrated” versions of their apps to provide the “hook” into the Teams solution for their specific app functionality. Today, over 1200+ integrations with Microsoft Teams are listed in the AppSource site for Teams apps.
Exploring Microsoft Teams app integrations in the Microsoft AppSource site
- Power BI
- Github
- Adobe Creative Cloud
- Jira
- Zoom
- Trello
- Geekbot
- Polly
- Karma
- ServiceNow
Power BI
With Power BI, Microsoft dispels the thought that organizations can make critical business decisions without the data to support those decisions. Instead, power BI is all about raw data and presenting the data in a way that enables data modeling, visualization, and reporting with customized key performance indicators (KPIs) tailored for your business use cases. These capabilities enable businesses to make data-informed decisions. In addition, power BI leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to answer business questions quickly. As business teams collaborate using Microsoft Teams, integrating Power BI into the Teams platform enables individual teams collaborating on data-driven projects to share and collaborate on interactive Power BI content in Microsoft Teams channels and chats. This integration enables the following:- Allows colleagues to find and discuss the Team’s data
- Embed interactive reports directly into Teams channels and chats
- Paste links to your reports, dashboards, and apps
- Share a filtered view of your Power BI reports and dashboards
- Get notified in the Teams activity feed when important things happen in Power BI
- Integrate a Power BI report in Teams and share it with external users
Power BI integration with Microsoft Teams
Github
Arguably, there is no more popular and impactful service to the application development world than Github. GitHub and similar services are at the heart of modern application development, featuring continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). In 2020, GitHub announced a new integration with Microsoft Teams that allows developers to collaborate around their projects from the context of Microsoft Teams. So, what does the new Github integration with Microsoft Teams bring to the table? Developers and DevOps teams can now see the following in Microsoft Teams from their GitHub environment:- New commits
- New pull requests
- New issues
- Status updates
- Comments
- Code reviews
Native Github integration with Microsoft Teams provides easy access to code repositories and actions
- Pull requests
- Issues
- Comments
- Code snippets
- Repositories
- Accounts or organizations
Adobe Creative Cloud
Many organizations have a creative department working on the creative design aspects of the business. Together with Microsoft Teams, Adobe Creative Cloud allows organizations to extend creative design workflows for the hybrid workforce using Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Teams’ communication and collaboration strengths. The integration between the two platforms enables users to have new levels of visibility and oversight of their Create Cloud projects in a centralized virtual workspace for collaboration. In addition, having access to your Creative Cloud files and assets from within Microsoft Teams enables finding what you need much more quickly. Instead of chatting about an Adobe Creative file or asset with a teammate and detailing where they can find these resources, integration with Microsoft Teams allows placing these resources directly into your Teams chat conversations and within channel posts.
Adobe Creative Cloud brings together creation and collaboration in a single platform
- Pin Adobe Creative Cloud assets directly to a channel tab and get feedback from teammates or other business stakeholders quickly and easily
- Creative Cloud assets can be shared in Microsoft Teams chat messages in rich formats
- Ability to use the Adobe Creative Cloud bot to keep track of activity on Creative Cloud assets using the Teams notifications feature
- Have visibility to version updates or comments made on Creative Cloud files
- Get notified of comments and updates to Creative Cloud files in Teams
Jira
Atlassian Jira is one of the top issue-tracking and project management solutions enterprise organizations use today. Many organizations are running Jira for bug tracking and agile project management. To go along with the common theme of efficiency with Microsoft Teams integration, Jira integration with Microsoft Teams provides a powerful integration for organizations to empower team members. Teams can use the centralized platform of Microsoft Teams to interact with and use Jira, all from within Teams. With the Jira integration for Microsoft Teams, it includes the following features:- Quick actions with Jira Server bots
- Search, share, or create new Jira issues for team members
- Track team progress and tasks with tabs
- Search, share, and create new or existing issues
- Track issues assigned to you or reported by you in the personal app
Jira integration with Microsoft Teams
Zoom
There is no question that Zoom is the absolute king of the hill when it comes to video conferencing. Since the pandemic began, Zoom, like Microsoft Teams, has seen explosive growth across the board. As a result, Zoom has become synonymous with video conference meetings. While Microsoft Teams has video calling functionality built-in, it still makes sense to integrate Zoom with Microsoft Teams. Why? Integrating Zoom meetings with your Microsoft Teams environment allows using Zoom seamlessly from your Microsoft Teams environment. Additionally, it is beneficial when joining video calls with other organizations, affiliates, third parties, and others using Zoom rather than Teams. Also, many companies prefer the video conferencing functionality of Zoom over Microsoft Teams, or they may have been a Zoom customer before rolling out Microsoft Teams. The Zoom integration with Microsoft Teams provides many additional benefits for Zoom customers who want to use its functionality inside Teams. With the Zoom Teams integration, customers can:- Launch Zoom meetings without leaving Microsoft Teams
- Create a new Zoom meeting
- Get Zoom meeting information and summaries
- View and access Zoom meeting recordings
Zoom integration with Microsoft Teams with Teams apps integration
Trello
Trello is an app that allows businesses to manage projects and achieve their productivity goals. It features intelligent boards, lists, and cards that organize tasks and foster a cohesive team. Trello for Microsoft Teams allows businesses to work creatively to collaborate, achieve goals, and manage projects using the Trello framework for doing so. You can view your Trello boards, lists, and cards within Microsoft Teams. You can also create new cards, move existing cards between lists in Trello, set due dates, and mark cards as complete. In addition, the Trello board can be added as a tab in the Teams channel. It allows everyone to view the board and navigate between the tasks it contains.
Trello for Microsoft Teams allows businesses to manage their projects within Teams
Geekbot
Many organizations today are taking advantage of the agile development methodology. The Scrum framework is a prevalent model used with the agile development methodology. However, while software development teams commonly use it, it can also be used across many verticals and applied to increase productivity across the board. Scrum standups are a central part of the agile development methodology that is much like a “sports huddle” where the team stays informed and connected and helps to give light to progress made on current tasks. Geekbot is a solution that provides a way to automate standups, retrospectives, and surveys from within the company’s Microsoft Teams environment. Geekbot helps to empower the already communication-rich Teams platform with the automated interactions provided by Geekbot. Geekbot allows sending questions, getting responses, and sharing these automatically within a Microsoft Teams channel without any manual activities. Organizations are using this very creative Microsoft Teams integration to run asynchronous standups that help bring remote-first employees together, get to know one another, and make the best use of everyone’s time. While in-person standups may be needed from time to time, Geekbot helps keep productivity flowing without interrupting the workflow between team members daily.
Geekbot helps to empower the already communication-rich Teams platform with the automated interactions provided by Geekbot.
Polly
Microsoft Teams provides a great platform for users to communicate and collaborate. However, when a team leads, or managers need to gather feedback, they want to do this in the least disruptive way possible and with as few meetings as possible to keep from interrupting the team’s productivity. Polly is a solution that allows gathering feedback from team members within Microsoft Teams. It enables creating polls that can be scheduled, configurable options, question types, anonymity levels, and controlling how results are displayed in Teams. It helps remove the barriers to constructive feedback since Polly can be configured with anonymity to users and allows gathering needed feedback to move projects and tasks forward.
Polly makes gathering feedback and input from team members extremely easy
Karmabot
It can be challenging to keep track of employee performance, especially when workers are located across time zones and remote locations. Karmabot helps organizations track the strengths and weaknesses of teams to help with productivity. In addition, Karmabot allows teammates and supervisors to award one another for achievements. The points can be added up and used for tangible rewards at specified intervals, such as cash, parties, or other rewards that appeal to team members. Karmabot uses machine learning algorithms and natural language understanding to glean important information about users and how each team functions. As a result, it helps to enhance Microsoft Teams with the tools needed to strengthen the performance of the team and award performance achievements. In the age of remote work, Karmabot helps bring teams together, even if these are remote. It also helps encourage teammates to increase the quality of their work and unlock the group’s potential as a whole. Traditionally, it has been more challenging to gauge the accomplishments of remote workers and how well they contribute to the team. Karmabot helps to change that with the technology tools needed to recognize the well-deserved achievements across the hybrid workforce.
Karmabot helps to reward team members and promote productivity
ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a SaaS-based IT service management (ITSM) platform that provides a fully-featured solution for organizations to manage their service desk operations. However, ServiceNow is more than a simple ticketing system. Instead, it is a task management system that can fully manage tasks and workflows in IT and also across the entire organization. Many organizations are using ServiceNow across the enterprise. In addition, many Microsoft Teams customers are also ServiceNow customers. With Microsoft Teams being the centralized communication and collaboration platform, it would be beneficial to have visibility of the ServiceNow environment within Microsoft Teams. With the Now Virtual Agent, organizations can integrate ServiceNow with Microsoft Teams and perform ServiceNow tasks directly in Teams to allow many efficiency benefits. It includes many features, including:- Performing routine ServiceNow actions via Microsoft Teams chat
- Interoperate with existing ServiceNow apps
- Find answers to questions using your ServiceNow database
- Resolve ServiceNow IT requests and other tasks from within Teams
The ServiceNow Virtual Agent for Microsoft Teams
Ways to build collaborative teams
Over the past two years, the hybrid remote workforce has been highly beneficial to organizations with work-from-home mandates, travel restrictions, and other challenges related to the global pandemic. As a result, businesses have had to reimagine collaboration and communication. Tools like Microsoft Teams and the powerful integrations discussed, among others, have allowed organizations to carry on despite the challenges. Building collaborative teams in challenging circumstances and with highly virtual layouts requires the following:- Effective communication
- Tools to empower users
- Easy access to resources
- Free flow of ideas
- The feeling of being part of a team
- Motivation