There are no two days same in Microsoft Teams side as it evolves. Now, we get bunch of new apps in the app store as per the recent announcement

Here is the one stop portal to search all available apps for Temas listed in AppSource ;

Some new additions;

SoapBox: Build meeting agendas and follow up easily from within Microsoft Teams.

Jell: Jell helps you manage your standups and check-ins to know what everyone’s working on.

Mural: Think and collaborate visually. With Mural, bring your digital workspace for innovation into Microsoft Teams.

Kronos: Kronos Bot is your personal assistant for daily routine time and labor management tasks. It gives you a way to interact with Kronos Workforce Dimensions using natural language.

Workboard: With Workboard’s Active Strategy Management solution, your team can set, measure and execute strategic priorities faster.

RememberThis: Avoid forgetting about important conversations, preventing them from disappearing in a stream of new content. By setting custom time-based reminders, RememberThis will add a reply to the conversation, bringing it back into your Activity Feed.

Freshdesk: Stay on top of your customer support tickets right in Microsoft Teams. The Freshdesk bot will notify you of important ticket related updates and you can respond to them directly from Teams.

SignEasy: Sign or send documents for signature without leaving Teams.

SIMON: SIMON is an AI chatbot that helps IT Ops manage their Microsoft cloud services right from Microsoft Teams.

Cloudbot for Azure: Cloudbot connects your Azure backend services directly to your development environment or devops teams.

Some updated apps;

Planner: Planner continues to add new features to the Teams integration. With this recent update, you can now include Schedule and Chart views in your Planner tab.

Meekan: Meekan has improved their Teams bot by releasing a new version that includes new capabilities to book meetings between colleagues and customers as well as improvements to the overall user experience.

Site 24×7: Site24x7 provides flexible uptime and performance monitoring for the cloud. Now, in addition to getting notifications about incidents in Teams, you can add a custom dashboard as a tab to view and communicate on Site24x7 data right in Teams.

Enjoy new additions…

Microsoft Teams has been keeping up with the roadmap on PC as well as mobile client, so here is the latest update from mobile app side.

Below is just a summary of the full announcement  published on 31/05/2018.

Meetings & Calling Experiences

• Join calls and meetings – initiate, receive, or join 1:1 calls and scheduled meetings via audio (VoIP), video or phone* with team members or others outside your organization.  If you need to add more participants to an ongoing conversation, the Teams mobile app allows you to search for additional members or enter a phone number to join a call or meetings.  (*Note: requires Phone System and/or Audio Conferencing)
• Share content & control presentations – share your iPhone or iPad screen, images, or live video stream with others meeting attendees.  Additionally, attendees can view presentations, request control and advance slides.  Alternatively, they can view the presentation in a private mode and skip ahead. Coming soon, you will be able to share Android screen, and files from cloud storage apps including OneDrive and SharePoint, directly in the mobile client.
• Transfer calls and configure call forward and simultaneous ring – once in call, transfer individual calls to another team member or a phone number.  You can also, configure call forwarding and simultaneous ring settings in the mobile client to ensure you don’t miss important calls. 
• Check voicemail –  retrieve all voicemail messages and transcripts*. You can also configure your settings such as changing your voicemail greeting directly in the mobile client.  (*Note: requires a license to Phone System in Office 365) 

Network & battery optimization

•  Bandwidth Optimization –  When you happen to cross a poor internet network while in a meeting, the Teams app gives you the option to ‘Call me back’ at a number you’ve set or re-join via a phone call.   Additionally, Teams will prompt with you with the option to switch from video to audio – giving you continued good audio quality
• Battery Optimization – Teams proactively monitors your battery life and gives you options to reduce the consumption of your battery.  During a meeting Teams will prompt you to switch from video to audio mode and also provides you the option of turning off all incoming video from others.  

I told a customer “Microsoft Teams is NOT a Skype for Business replacement, the next version or upgraded skin for it” and he asked “Then what it is?”…my reply was “It is the next generation Intelligent Communications platform” and now I’m writing this blog based on that 🙂

This is such times I see customers increasingly overwhelmed and trying to digest the Microsoft Teams move given the Roadmap  is well published and transparent to all.

Specially, the current Skype for Business On-prem and Hybrid customers are struggling in “fit in” to the bandwagon since the perception of the “Cloud” has not been accepted as a matured service platform in some corners of the world.

The bottom line is that the technology has been advanced to an ultimate level we face “evolve or die” situation where Unified Communication has no exemption.

It is very important to be convinced that the Teams is not yet another product from Microsoft which we install and run on our computers and devices. It has been completely changing the way we communicate and will be the immediate future of a single pane of glass.

From the architecture point of view Microsoft Teams is a complete ground-up platform constructed based on cloud centric Microservices service model while Skype for Business was built on Monolithic model.

The best advantage I see in this new architecture is the intelligent Teams client which can operate on different platforms without signifying fundamental differences in each instance, which means Teams client can apply updates without platform boundaries.

The completeness of Teams is all about rich user experience of Azure AD, Office 365 Groups, SharePoint Online, OneNote, OneDrive, Exchange, PowerBI, Machine Learning and brand new Chat/Calling/meeting platform in one window.

So, I wouldn’t introduce Teams as a next SFBO, but the “next generation Intelligent Communications platform”…