Customising Teams Meeting Experiences with Apps

As conducting meetings virtually becomes the norm, Microsoft is now providing us with the ability to customise how our meetings look with the use of apps directly within your Teams client.

The Shift to Hybrid

As businesses continue to shift towards a hybrid work environment, virtual meeting users are looking for customised and feature-rich meetings experiences. Allowing teams to work together on projects, sales enablement and incident management.

Teams has long provided us with a unified collaboration platform for both internal and external meeting participants and the platform provides developers new content surfaces and APIs to reimagine how apps can change the experience of meetings.

App Integration

Meetings are not a static experience, during the meeting lifecycle there are several interactions from users leading up to, during and even after the meeting. With the ability for app integration across the entire meeting lifecycle this empowers users to make their meetings collaborative and productive. 

APIs for Richer Meeting Experiences

In the past apps could be integrated with chats, either 1:1 or group chats, but not within the context of a meeting. Now with meetings extensibility, developers can bring their apps to within meetings.

With three new extensible content surfaces for meetings, developers have many opportunities to integrate their apps and power rich and unique scenarios. These new surfaces include: 1) Pre and Post meeting tab; 2) In-meeting side panel; and 3) In-meeting content notification.

Pre-meeting experience will allow users to discover new meeting apps and prepare for their meeting in advance, whether it's drafting a poll or scheduling tasks for the team.

Post-meeting tabs are used to capture meeting notes, outcomes and further steps for attendees to action, much like a de-brief session. 

In-meeting content side panel provides a canvas for developers to build experience for the apps. These experiences can be customised based on users roles within the meeting, allowing participants and organisers to have different views and actions.

And in-meeting content notifications enable even deeper integration via the in-meeting notification surface. Developers can use this surface to engage participants during the meeting and gather actionable information from the meeting itself.

Underneath all these new surfaces are meeting APIs that power these experiences. From fetching participant information to surface roster/roles for contextualised experiences to notification APIs that signal based on end-user action to showcase an in-meeting notification bubble – developers will use these to power the services that will enable their meeting app experiences.

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