Teams app that fits

Microsoft Teams offers a collection of apps that are provided by Microsoft or external services. Teams apps can be tabs, bots, or message extensions or any combination of the three. These apps expand the value of your Teams collaborative experience.

Apps can be personal or shared. A personal app enables a one-on-one communication, and a shared app lets multiple users share app space to collaborate.

Driving organizational goals

Collaboration and communication are key for an organization. Concise communication, integration with necessary services, and on-the-go accessibility is why organizations are increasingly choosing to rely on apps.

Organizations use it to connect with their customers, provide services, and share information. But that's not all! Apps are the meeting place for people to work together. A well-placed app helps build a cohesive environment for external and internal business needs.

Let's look at some areas where an app helps to meet a business need.

Development Options	Business Opportunities
- Desktop app - Web app - Mobile app	- Increase user engagements - Make your app discoverable on Teams Store
Customer benefits	Internal workflows
- On-the-go accessibility - Secure customer data - Ease of communication	- Automate repetitive tasks - Simplify tasks with bots,    such as Q&A and Help-desk

You can build apps with Teams Developer platform by extending Teams capabilities to fit your needs. Create something brand new for Teams or integrate an existing app.

Build apps with Microsoft Teams platform

Teams apps help your collaborative workspace to be more productive by bringing key information, common tools, and trusted processes to where people increasingly gather, learn, and work. Apps are how you extend the capabilities of Team platform to fit your requirements. Create something brand new or integrate an existing app, and you utilize benefits of Teams platform for your particular business needs.

The benefits of building apps span from meeting organizational goals to increasing internal productivity.

Here's why Teams is best-suited for your app needs:

• Communication and collaboration

  Most successful Teams apps involve pulling information from another system, having a conversation about it, and letting users to take action. Teams lets you do all these tasks directly within the Teams client. You can even push information to a targeted audience based on an event or action in an external system.

• Social interactions

  Teams is a social platform; custom social-focused apps encourage your team to extend your company culture into your collaboration space. Use apps for sending polls, letting people share feedback with each other, enabling connection, and communication.

  

• Common business processes

  Tasks like creating and sharing a sales call report, tracking your project timeline, reserving common resources, submitting help desk requests are repetitive tasks. They make for effective Teams apps.

  In addition to automating repetitive workflows, you can use apps to help with communication issues. A chat bot is an easy replacement for emails and phone calls to IT or HR departments.

  

• Teams Store advantage

  Push your app on Teams store to improve app's availability and you can use it as a marketing opportunity. If you're running a startup, Teams platform helps to increase awareness of your products. Teams Store marketplace can be a great platform for large audiences to discover your app.

• Surface existing app

  If you've got an existing web app, SharePoint site (or SPFx extension), PowerApp, or other web-based application, it may make sense to enable some or all of it in Teams. Extending existing apps and porting interactive functionalities to Teams helps to grow user base and user engagement for your app.

  

• Personal apps with tabs and bots

  One-to-one conversational bots are one of the more open-ended features in Teams. The conversation is just between the bot and your user. You have the flexibility of including task modules to simplify complex sets of information.

  For example, if your app is a design tool with multiple collaborators, a shared bot that notifies all users helps to build user engagement.

Next step

From ideas to Teams app