Microsoft Teams, Viva, and SharePoint: Platform opportunities
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Hello Peer,
I am not a developer. And I don’t play one on TV (or the radio). I am merely an appreciative observer to both what’s possible and the magic developer wizards wield.
I was asked to pull together a few talking points for an upcoming keynote my GM is set to deliver; one section focuses on the platform commonality across our apps and services - with a focus on Microsoft Viva. In researching the magic, I found a lot, and I thought it would be helpful to dig in and review the connective tissue between Teams, Viva, and SharePoint: the related framework approach, the technology and data modeling on the back-end.
What flows below borrows from the work of others, presented here in aggregate with a few connector thoughts to showcase how it all comes together.
Armchair devs, and real ones, too - let us upskill together.
Teams provides a powerful and extensible platform
Stay in the flow of work with the apps you know and use. Within Teams, you can create custom low-code solutions to respond quickly to changes in the business. And when you need to, build fully custom apps for your most critical solutions.
Breaking down the parts and pieces help understand what you can do, and begin to articulate how you’re going to do it so your new custom app or experience lives, and breathes, in Teams:
Tabs allow you to surface rich content within Teams, so you can bring the tools and services your team cares about right into a channel or private chat. Add rich dashboards and data visualization, collaborate on documents and note taking, manage tasks across the group, share designs.
Bots help users get tasks done in conversation in Teams. Bots can do things like kick off workflows and provide status on them, give and receive kudos from team members, create lightweight surveys to gauge employee satisfaction, and answer natural language questions about sales and customer usage data.
Connectors and webhooks help bring useful information and rich content from external services into channels in Microsoft Teams. Get social media notifications, updates about pull and push requests, news updates.
With Actionable messages, you can add rich content to your connector cards.
Compose extensions allow users to query and share rich cards in conversations.
Activity feed notifications engage users via feed notifications.
Learn more about building custom apps and experiences on the Microsoft Teams platform.
The Microsoft Viva platform and its growing ecosystem
Like Teams above, the Viva-powered EXP is a digital platform that acts as an organizing layer for your existing solutions such as HR, Learning Management, and CRM. Viva provides an open and extensible platform, with a strong ecosystem of partners, so it works seamlessly - building on Teams and leveraging the Microsoft Graph extensibility framework where devs can flex their existing skills.
Microsoft Viva is an integrated employee experience platform (EXP), designed to empower people and teams to be their best. Viva brings together Communications, Insights, Knowledge, and Learning within the flow of everyday work and it’s built into apps like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Office.
Hear more about the EXP platform plus ecosystem from Chuck Friedman, CVP at Microsoft:
Learn more about Microsoft Viva.
The SharePoint Framework (#SPFx) relationship
If you ask me which came first, the Teams platform chicken or the SharePoint solution egg, I as a SharePoint product manager will always cross the road with the egg balanced on a spoon - playing chicken with my other PMM product peers to cross the finish line - together.
We know thousands of organizations rely on enterprise apps built on SharePoint, so we’ve made strides in integrating Teams app development with the SharePoint Framework (SPFx). By building Teams apps using SPFx, IT can save costs on hosting infrastructure and simplify the deployment and operation process – while SharePoint developers can expand the breadth and use of their apps using the framework they know and love.
It’s the build once, deploy in multiple locations approach. Saves time, leverages the same skillset, and optimizes the lifecycle management of custom apps.
Learn more about SharePoint Framework.
Final thoughts
One last thought, in audio format…
In a previous, related episode of The Intrazone, “An API for teamwork,” we uncover the power and capabilities of Microsoft teams as a platform. We chat with two experts: Bill Bliss, platform architect for Microsoft Teams engineering and Wictor Wilén, Global innovation lead, Avanade. You’ll hear all about bots, tabs and connectors – the basis of the what and how to approach extending the Microsoft Teams platform.
The important point we want to highlight for the keynote presentation is this: Microsoft 365 is an extensible platform - meaning you can customize Teams, Viva, SharePoint, and more. Some recently have coined Teams as the “Meta OS” borrowing from recent Web development patterns and practices. And we’ve worked to establish Microsoft Graph as THE single endpoint (API) pathway for you to connect services and content into the custom solutions and apps you require.
Cheerios, Mark
P.S. (Pun Sharing)
Get your eye rolls ready to bake… one pun from me, @mkashman 🙄, and one from the world: