Enabling hybrid work with Microsoft 365 and collaborative apps

Nicole Herskowitz, Corporate Vice President, Productivity and Collaboration Copilot

July 16, 2021

The world around us has dramatically changed. Hybrid, global work requires structural changes to how we build and interact with applications. We need a new class of apps that are centered around enabling synchronous and asynchronous modes of collaboration with real-time meetings, ad-hoc messaging, document collaboration, and business processes automation. Microsoft Teams, together with the Microsoft Cloud, offers a comprehensive stack of technologies to build the next generation of apps: collaborative apps.

Collaborative applications open up tremendous new economic opportunities for our partners to extend existing applications and build new experiences. With over 145 million people using Microsoft Teams every day, our partners can reach more users and deepen the usage of their solutions. And it’s easy to build collaborative apps with Power Apps and Dataverse integrated in Teams to quickly deliver no-code or low-code solutions in addition to the Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio which lets you use existing web development skills to build cross-platform Teams apps against any backend. Not only are more partners building collaborative apps with Teams, but we’re also seeing significant growth in users utilizing collaborative apps in Teams. Since the start of 2020, monthly active users of independent software vendor (ISV) and custom app-built solutions on Teams has grown nearly 10 times.

Today, we’re announcing new and updated collaborative apps delivered by Microsoft and our partners available now or coming soon in Microsoft Teams. We’re also announcing new ways to improve commercial opportunities for our partners along with new resources to help you build collaborative apps quickly.

Microsoft Teams + Dynamics 365 collaborative app experience

At Microsoft, we are building collaborative apps from the ground up with new products like Microsoft Viva and extending existing products like Microsoft Dynamics 365. With Dynamics 365 in Microsoft Teams, more people across departments and roles, can find, view, and update records ensuring the right individuals can take the next best action faster and more efficiently. At Microsoft Inspire, we’re also announcing that Dynamics 365 users can invite any Microsoft Teams user within the organization to view and contribute to customer records at no additional licensing cost.

Partners can also bring in their rich business and vertical functions directly into any Teams application. This integration and accessibility across the organization without the need to pay for multiple underlying software licenses creates net-new opportunities for our partner ecosystem.

Partners building collaborative apps in Microsoft Teams

Confluence Cloud by Atlassian will be available in Teams later this month. This collaborative app integrates right where people work—in chat, meetings, and channels. Confluence Cloud in Teams is designed to enable more effective meetings where users can take notes with a Confluence notes panel inside a Teams meeting. Confluence makes team notes digestible and action-oriented and allows users to format notes such as action items, decisions, code snippets, mentions, and tables. These notes are then formatted and automatically shared in a Teams channel.

Confluence Cloud in Teams uses multiple extensibility points like meetings apps, adaptive cards, and message extensions to enable this experience in Teams.

The ServiceNow app for Teams is available now and is designed to improve employee collaboration and productivity by optimizing workflows for IT, HR, Facilities, and other departments. With ServiceNow’s AI-powered Virtual Agent chatbot surfacing right where work happens in Teams, employees can quickly get information and resolve issues without contacting an agent or a help desk employee. The Virtual Agent can easily make requests and perform routine work tasks—such as automating password resets, ordering a new laptop, or scheduling time off—via chat in Teams, and it can seamlessly transfer complex issues to the right human agent when needed using the Microsoft Graph.

Levi Strauss is already seeing the benefits of the ServiceNow Virtual Agent in Teams. Employees worldwide can easily request and receive IT services in Teams resulting in increased help desk agent productivity and employee satisfaction. After implementing the integration, Levi Strauss saw a deflection rate in cases of over 50 percent, and the internal customer service rate (CSAT) for their employees surged to 100 percent.

monday.com in Teams available today incorporates project building blocks such as boards, views, charts, and automations into the flow of everyday work. The project views have Teams channel, chat, and individual context taking advantage of multiple areas of Teams extensibility. Most importantly, these different contexts provide information on projects across a user’s experience, making work more seamless throughout the day.

Salesforce for Teams is now generally available. With this collaborative app, sales and service teams using Salesforce Sales Cloud or Service Cloud can bring account data and records into their Teams workspace for better collaboration and decision making. With the app, users can pin Salesforce records to channels, chats, and calendar meetings to easily keep access to them—with an expanded set of supported Salesforce records, including Custom Objects. Additionally, Salesforce records can be directly updated from Teams, the Chatter feed of Salesforce can be records pinned on tabs, and Salesforce records can be mentioned in Teams channels and chats to facilitate collaboration.

Workday in Teams will release an update in the next month to add a new Teams tab experience to help users complete workflows and tasks via a clickable UI. Today the app can be used to reduce the friction needed to complete everyday HR and finance tasks in the flow of work. With Workday in Microsoft Teams, employees can book time off, snap a picture of their receipt to create a new expense item, give their coworkers feedback directly from Teams, and gather interview feedback on a job candidate.

SAP Sales Cloud in Teams is coming later this year to simplify remote sales processes and allow sales professionals to fully focus on their customer engagements. Users can easily set up meetings from the SAP system without switching applications. During a customer call, all information will be accessible in Microsoft Teams via an embedded SAP Sales Cloud application. Finally, all information, including meeting recording and notes, will get automatically synced back to SAP Sales Cloud in real-time using a Teams meetings app.

Build collaborative apps and get them to market faster

We’re announcing Microsoft 365 ISV Build and Go-To-Market benefits to help you build collaborative apps and get to market faster. ISVs can now access resources from Microsoft to integrate their solutions into Teams and Viva and light up new collaborative experiences. These resources include access to Microsoft technology, one-to-one consults with Microsoft experts to help you design and build your applications, marketing resources to increase your exposure to new customers, and support with achieving co-sell status to increase your visibility with Microsoft’s field.

New opportunities for partners to grow revenue with Microsoft Teams

Later this year, partners will be able to sell their apps within Teams, expanding the ability to monetize your offerings and providing a simplified experience for Teams admins to purchase apps and subscriptions on behalf of your organization.

Teams IT admins will be able to install and purchase ISV apps from either AppSource or from directly inside the Teams Admin Center with a credit card or via invoice enabling the preferred method for many enterprise customers. Additionally, ISVs can offer private pricing to customers, which can help you secure larger deals in Teams and Teams admin center.

We’re also announcing that we are reducing marketplace fees significantly for transactable offers from the industry standard of 20 percent to 3 percent for all transactions. App purchases will become available later this year.