Microsoft Ignite: Teams Meeting Extensions Coming for Partner Solutions

MICROSOFT IGNITE — At least 20 technology partners will embed Microsoft Teams meetings extensions into their respective platforms starting next month.

HireVue, ServiceNow, Range, Buncee and PagerDuty will integrate Teams meetings into their software, enabling native communications from their solutions. And soon, any partner will be able to integrate Teams into their solutions using Microsoft’s PowerApps platform. The new extensions are among several new Teams features in the pipeline announced Wednesday at the Microsoft Ignite virtual conference. Microsoft Ignite is the company’s annual gathering for IT professionals and software developers.

Microsoft Teams is in the spotlight at this year’s Ignite, as it was during its Inspire partner conference in July. Teams has become core to Microsoft’s emphasis on responding to what it calls the “future of work,” accelerated by COVID-19.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella

“The culture of work is rapidly changing,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in his Ignite keynote address. “These past several months and served as the largest at scale experiment we’ve seen for remote work.”

Nadella argued that Microsoft Teams is the only platform that enables calling, chat, collaboration with Office and business process workflows.

“Teams doesn’t just connect people inside the organization, it also seamlessly connects you to customers through video meetings, webinars, remote selling, supply chain and other scenarios,” Nadella added. “We’re adding new video meetings experiences in Teams along with reimagined workspaces for every collaborator — remote, in person or on the go. And we’re shipping new features each week for both first line and knowledge workers.”

ServiceNow ‘Doubling Down’ with Teams

Karan Nigam, group product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams, explained the new extensions during an Ignite session. Microsoft calls the extensions Teams extensibility points.

“Now developers can create apps, allowing users to access tailored experiences right in the context of meetings,” he said.

ServiceNow, for example, will embed Teams into its customer support offering.

“ServiceNow is building an integration to deliver a seamless customer support experience,” Nigam said. “Once an incident has been flagged in ServiceNow, an agent can quickly bring the right people together on a Teams meeting to collaborate on the solution.”

Using Teams’ new content notifications, it can send alerts to team members when an issue arises, he added.

“As the team works out a solution, they can edit and update the incident directly within the app in the context of the meeting itself, accelerating the resolution, and ultimately increasing the customer satisfaction,” Nigam said. “Post meeting, all of the charts are captured and are accessible from the meeting shot panel and are available for post incident reviews.”

ServiceNow announced a partnership with Microsoft Wednesday, focused on its plans to integrate Teams into the Now platform.

“We are doubling down on Teams to find innovative ways for workflows to elevate engagement, culture, collaboration, and productivity — no matter where people are,” according to ServiceNow chief product officer Chirantan “CJ” Desai.

Initially, employees working for companies where ServiceNow is the customer support platform will be able to submit requests, get updates and notifications, and chat with virtual agents within Teams. For service agents, they will be able to notify employees and conference with other agents.

More Extensions

Among others that announced plans to implement the extensions: