Use your developer subscription to build Microsoft 365 solutions

What do you want to build with your Microsoft 365 developer subscription? Depending on what you are interested in, you can do a lot of different things. The following are some of the products and technology areas that you can start with.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace that integrates with the apps and services that people use to get work done together. The Microsoft Teams developer platform makes it easy for you to integrate your own service, whether you develop custom apps for your enterprise or SaaS applications for teams around the world.

To get started building with Microsoft Teams:

  1. Prepare your developer subscription.
  2. Set up your development environment. This process will vary depending on the type of app or service you are building. For details, see one of the following:

Microsoft Graph

You can use Microsoft Graph to interact with the data of millions of users in the Microsoft cloud. Use Microsoft Graph to build apps for organizations and consumers that connect to a wealth of resources, relationships, and intelligence, all through a single endpoint: https://graph.microsoft.com.

To automatically configure your sandbox to try out Microsoft Graph scenarios, install the Users and Mail and events sample data packs:

  • Users - Installs 16 fictitious users with licenses, mailboxes, and metadata, including names and photos for each user. Use Microsoft Graph APIs to work with user sample data in the following ways:
    • Get specific user details
    • Update user
    • Get direct reports
    • Prepare organization chart
    • Get users by department
  • Mail and events - Adds Outlook email conversations and calendar events for each of the 16 sample users. Use Microsoft Graph APIs to work with mail and events sample data in the following ways:
    • Get emails by users
    • Get emails filtered by date
    • Get upcoming events
    • Update/delete upcoming events

For details, see Use sample data packs.

For more ways to get started working with Microsoft Graph, see the Microsoft Graph Quick Start and documentation.

Office Add-ins

You can use the Office Add-ins platform to build solutions that extend Office applications and interact with content in Office documents. With Office Add-ins, you can use familiar web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to extend and interact with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Project, and Outlook. Your solution can run in Office across multiple platforms, including Office for Windows, Office Online, Office for the Mac, and Office for the iPad.

To set up your development environment and create your first add-in, see the Office Add-ins quick starts.

SharePoint Framework

The SharePoint Framework (SPFx) is a page and web part model that provides full support for client-side SharePoint development, easy integration with SharePoint data, and support for open source tooling. With the SharePoint Framework, you can use modern web technologies and tools in your preferred development environment to build productive experiences and apps that are responsive and mobile-ready.

To automatically configure your sandbox to try out different SharePoint templates and scenarios, install the SharePoint sample data pack. For more details, see:

Power Apps

Power Apps for Office 365 is included in your Microsoft 365 E5 developer subscription license. This means that you can create and test unlimited apps with standard connectors. To use premium or custom connectors, and Dataverse you need an additional license. For development and testing purposes, you can use the Power Apps Developer Plan.

Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors and data platform that provides a rapid application development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. Using Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your business data stored either in the underlying data platform (Common Data Service) or in various online and on-premises data sources (SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and so on).

Apps built using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business processes to digital, automated processes. Further, apps built using Power Apps have a responsive design, and can run seamlessly in browser or on mobile devices (phone or tablet). Power Apps "democratizes" the custom business app building experience by enabling users to build feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.

Power Apps also provides an extensible platform that lets pro developers programmatically interact with data and metadata, apply business logic, create custom connectors, and integrate with external data.

For more information: