At its Build 2017 developer conference, Microsoft has announced that it will be bringing new opportunities to developers through Office 365. The company says that Microsoft Teams is now open to all developers to publish apps through the Office Store. These apps will be visible in a new ‘discover apps experience’ feature that will make it easier for users to add and use apps within teams. These features are now available in Developer Preview, and will be available to all users soon.
Besides these, the company also introduced two new capabilities available in Developer Preview. These included Compose extensions, and third-party notifications in the activity feed. Compose extensions allows users to issue commands to bring information from an app or service directly into their Team chat. As the name would suggest, third-party notifications in the activity feed allows developers to alert users of important information and updates to their service.
Further, Microsoft announced that new Teams APIs are coming to Microsoft Graph, allowing developers to access team and channel information. Developers can now package capabilities like abs, bots and connectors, compose extensions, and activity feed notifications into a single Teams app in order to make it simpler to publish and manage.
Besides Teams specific updates, announced that it will be expanding JavaScript APIs in Word and Excel in preview, which would let developers access and extend structured data within documents.
OneDrive will be getting new File Handler capabilities that will allow partners to extend the experience of working with files with new web-based views and connected actions. The SharePoint Framework will allow developers use modern javaScript tools and framework to build web parts within SharePoint. The preview version will soon be getting SharePoint Framework Extensions, lettings developers use these tools to customise SharePoint team sites, document libraries, and lists
During the event, Microsoft demonstrated its upcoming Presentation Translator add-in, which uses Microsoft’s translation APIs in PowerPoint. This would allow presenters the ability to add subtitles to their presentations in the same or different languages. New Insight APIs will allow developers build smarter processes by leveraging relationships between users and documents. The company also made two new core capabilities of Microsoft Graph, namely Delta Queries and Custom data generally available.
Microsoft announced an offer for Microsoft Azure ISV customer that allows them to directly provide new PowerApps and Flow Connectors to Office 365 customers. The company is rolling out its Actionable Messages to more Office 365 users in Microsoft Teams as well as in Outlook 2016 for Windows Insiders who are a part of the fast ring. Further, new Actionable Message tools are now available for developers.