Microsoft Teams now includes Fluid components and integrations with main stage meeting apps
Microsoft Teams now includes Fluid components and integrations with 'main stage' meeting apps
Microsoft unveiled new Teams features this week at its Build virtual conference, aimed at enhancing employee collaboration and productivity. Among the changes are deeper app integrations for video meetings and new co-editing features.
The moves together aim to broaden Teams' appeal as a work platform, according to Angela Ashenden, a principal analyst at CCS Insight, by enabling users to integrate a broader range of apps and processes into the Teams environment.
Among the updates is "shared stage integration," which integrates third-party tools such as whiteboards and design apps into the central Teams meeting screen, dubbed the "main stage" by Microsoft.
The shared stage integration, which is currently in private preview, follows the November launch of Teams Apps for Meetings, which enabled developers to integrate 20 third-party apps into the Teams meeting interface via a side panel.
The addition of third-party apps to Teams follows similar moves by Microsoft's competitor Zoom, which announced integrations for its own video meeting platform at last year's Zoomtopia conference. “While Microsoft was not the first to announce meeting apps for Teams... Microsoft has increased its investment in this area and has been able to leverage its experience to comfortably outpace the market,” Ashenden explained.
Other developer-focused updates include the ability to create custom scenes for Teams' Together mode (which is expected to launch this summer), "media APIs" for developing services around audio and video streams, and "meeting event APIs" for automating some workflows via events such as the start and end of a meeting. Microsoft has promised to release additional event APIs later this year.
Microsoft also announced the availability of its "Fluid components" via the Teams chat interface. The Fluid Framework, which was announced at Build 2019 with the goal of removing barriers between collaboration and productivity apps. This entails decoupling elements such as tables, charts, and lists and allowing them to be connected and updated in real time across multiple tools.
Fluid components in Teams will enable users to update and add "next steps" to a shared to-do list that can be accessed and edited concurrently by a colleague using Outlook.
“This is part of a larger investment by Microsoft in rethinking the well-established document creation concept, though it has taken time to materialize after being announced two years ago,” Ashenden explained.
“It's also an area that's seeing increased competition, with startups Coda and Airtable pioneering the concept, followed by Quip and, most recently, Google with its announcements about smart canvas.”
Fluid components in Teams are currently in private preview
The cross-platform integrations are part of a broader effort to connect Teams to external apps, reducing the need to switch screens, according to Wayne Kurtzman, an IDC research director. Microsoft has been lagging behind its competitors in this area.
“Microsoft is rapidly moving Teams into the next chapter, where all necessary software is integrated into Teams: an area that has been difficult for them to compete with Slack,” he said. “If Microsoft leverages their family of technologies to consolidate more work into a'single pane of glass' and eliminate context switching, it could be exciting to see an enhanced user experience enhanced by Azure's native intelligence.”
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