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About this lesson

Microsoft allows you to extend Teams by adding Tabs that open to applications outside of Teams. You can create easy to access documents for Word, Excel, or Onenote or interact with services like MailChimp, Adobe Sign, or Salesforce. This lesson reviews adding applications to tabs, the kinds of activities they can do, and common practices. 

Quick reference

Adding Applications to Teams

Add 3rd party applications to Teams as well as documents and Microsoft services as applications to the left sidebar, a channel posts feed, or as a channel tab.

When to use

Often a company will make user of external services that would be useful to have to a Team. For example, you may use Adobe Sign to for e-signature, MailChimp, Trello, Smartsheet, GitHub, Workday among others. There are 100's of companies that have compatibility with Microsoft Teams. You can also many Microsoft services such as Project, Flow, and Microsoft Dynamics or share files that are important a team project so everyone can see the file without having to open it directly.

Instructions

You can add an application to the left sidebar by click on the Apps icon at the bottom of the left sidebar menu. This menu is your personal view so is not shared with the team. This allows you to add applications that are useful for your work, and not necessarily intended for all to use.

To add an application for team use, you can add the application to the Posts feed for a channel by clicking on the ellipses at the bottom of the screen (...). When you add an application here it creates an entry in the Posts feed. This is great for adding something you want to share with the team but will get bumped up the screen as additional posts happen. To keep content or a service persistently on a channel feed, click the + icon at the top of the screen. This adds an application to the channel. You could for example, add an Excel spreadsheet that list important contacts for a project, add Microsoft Project to the channel for tracking deliverables and assigning action items, add a OneNote document for team collaboration during meetings, etc. 

Hints & tips

  • Remember that any service or content you add to the Posts feed or Channel tabs must be accessible to everyone on the team or they will not be able to view the content.
  • Spend some time exploring the options available in the applications as there is likely a good way to bring services you use into Teams
  • Sharing commonly used documents such as a part list, project plan, meeting notes or other useful collateral as Tab in a channel is a best practice for improving collaboration. If you find yourself constantly sharing a link to file, consider adding it as a Tab in Teams instead.
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  • 00:04 In Teams, you can add features and
  • 00:06 capabilities that are not built into Teams, but are still very, very useful.
  • 00:10 You can add them in a number of places, and
  • 00:12 they're provided by hundreds of different companies, including Microsoft,
  • 00:17 Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, Zendesk, and hundreds of others.
  • 00:20 On the left menu towards the bottom you'll see an Apps icon.
  • 00:25 If you click on the Apps icon, you'll see a list of hundreds of different
  • 00:29 applications that you can add as a jumping point into these applications.
  • 00:34 And they'll provide capability to you directly within the Teams interface.
  • 00:38 This has the potential to make your Teams interface sort of a one-stop dashboard for
  • 00:43 all of your productivity needs.
  • 00:45 That's the intention here.
  • 00:47 And for the most part, it works fairly well.
  • 00:50 Just by way of demonstration, let's add OneNote.
  • 00:53 So, we'll click OneNote, and we'll click Open.
  • 00:57 And this will automatically connect to OneNote as a service,
  • 01:01 which is built into Office 365 or Microsoft 365.
  • 01:04 And add, on the left, an icon into your application.
  • 01:09 And that's what happens when you add an application from the left panel.
  • 01:14 In addition to adding apps to the left menu,
  • 01:17 you can add applications to the post feed for a channel.
  • 01:21 At the text box at the bottom of the screen,
  • 01:24 if you click ..., you'll see, Find an app.
  • 01:27 And this allows you to add apps that may be useful for
  • 01:31 the purpose of posting into the feed.
  • 01:33 Let's add the News app.
  • 01:35 And then, we'll simply select Arizona brush fires.
  • 01:41 And the news article's posted directly into the Team chat.
  • 01:44 This allows you to interact with news services, RSS feeds, YouTube,
  • 01:49 or other sources of information that can be useful to the entire team.
  • 01:53 One of the most common uses of adding an application, is to make them available for
  • 01:57 the entire channel.
  • 01:58 Which you do by clicking, Add a tab, at the top of the screen.
  • 02:02 By adding a tab, it'll open directly into an Excel Spreadsheet, for
  • 02:06 example, or a form that you create, a OneNote application, a PDF, or
  • 02:10 any other resource of value to your team.
  • 02:14 It's very common, for example, to add a OneNote notebook for
  • 02:18 the team to collaborate on with meetings.
  • 02:21 This makes it easy for everyone to access meeting information, and content, and
  • 02:26 shared access to the same information.
  • 02:28 In the same way, you can add Excel Spreadsheets,
  • 02:31 Visio, other websites, or Microsoft Word documents.
  • 02:35 There are, literally, hundreds of applications available that you can add
  • 02:39 into Teams, to help your team be more productive.
  • 02:41 And one of the more popular ones to add on a team is Microsoft Planner.
  • 02:46 Microsoft Planner allows you to create different projects, assign tasks to
  • 02:50 people, who will then be notified whenever those tests are coming up, or perhaps due.
  • 02:55 It's a easy-to-use interface, and it's very popular.
  • 02:58 Let's review Adding Applications to Teams.
  • 03:01 Applications allow you to extend the capabilities of Teams.
  • 03:04 And you can add applications to the left menu,
  • 03:07 when you want to access the applications you're adding, just personally.
  • 03:11 You can add apps that post to the Team's chat by adding them in the Team Posts Page
  • 03:15 at the bottom of the screen.
  • 03:17 This will allow them to post content directly into the team chat feed.
  • 03:21 Adding an application to the Channel Tab,
  • 03:23 will make that application available to the entire channel.
  • 03:26 This is great for sharing commonly used documents, and
  • 03:29 links to forms, third-party applications, BI dashboards,
  • 03:33 Microsoft Planner, as well as hundreds of other applications.
  • 03:36 The extensibility built into Teams, is one of the reasons for its success.
  • 03:41 It's really a great enhancement that allows you to bring all kinds
  • 03:44 of capabilities into Teams, to ensure your productivity.

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