Introduction
In the Microsoft Teams developer platform, you can add tabs as personal workspaces. You can also add tabs to group chats, channels, and meetings. A tab is a large canvas for displaying content such as webpages, documents, or custom app experiences.
Teams tabs can be designed for different scopes, based on whether the desired context is personal or collaborative. If you're interested in building a canvas for collaboration across groups of people, you can create a tab app for a group chat or a team channel. If you're interested in building a canvas for individual use and an individual user's productivity, you can create a tab as a personal workspace. By providing users with access to relevant and useful information in the form of tab apps, you can help users get more value from their Teams experience.
In this module, you'll learn how to build a Teams tab by using Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.
Prerequisites
- Global Administrator access to a Microsoft 365 tenant with uploading Teams custom apps enabled.
- Basic understanding of Microsoft Teams and the extensibility points for apps. We recommend that you complete the Introduction to building apps for Microsoft Teams training module.
- Ability to develop applications by using JavaScript.
- Visual Studio Code with the Teams Toolkit extension installed.
- Node.js v16 installed.
- Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome web browser installed.
Learning objectives
In this module, you will:
- Learn the basics of Teams tab apps.
- Learn the benefits of using Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code for building Teams tabs.
- Create and debug a Teams tab by using Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.
Scenario
Suppose your team has been assigned a project in your company to build an app for support engineers to manage all the customer support tickets. You decide to integrate a Teams tab app into the support engineers' channel. Support engineers can then view and update the status of tickets, manage assignees, and add comments or attachments, while staying in conversation with each other.
The app can also provide support engineers with access to relevant information and resources, such as FAQs or support documentation, to help them resolve tickets more efficiently. By providing a convenient and integrated way to manage support tickets within Teams, the app can help improve the overall support process and enhance collaboration among the support engineers.
Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code can help you build and deploy a tab with minimal configuration requirements.
In the next unit, you'll learn how to build your first tab by using Teams Toolkit.