Let’s talk about creating low code apps for Microsoft Teams

In July 2020, Microsoft announced awesome new app building capabilities for Microsoft Teams, and a huge step forward in the integration between Microsoft Teams and the Power Platform. Now going by the placeholder name “Project Oakdale”, this announcement was all about making it easy to create low code custom apps, workflows and bots for Microsoft Teams.

For a couple of weeks there it had a different name, but that is now the one which shall not be named. There is plenty written about that already, both in the press and all over social media. TL:DR – lawsuit, “we saw that coming”, “SkyDrive”, and a fair dose of schadenfreude.

But wait, what was that bit about it being easy to create low code custom apps for Teams?

I don’t want to take anything away from the real cost (time and money) and confusion that happens when a product is re-named or mis-named. It’s highly disruptive for all involved. But the real shame, and the other huge cost, is that the game changing technology that just got announced gets somewhat lost in the noise.

Let’s look into the future a little way …. when we are using a new name as everyday terminology, and when we are working with something that will have enabled millions of people to get more out of Microsoft Teams and to have discovered the Power Platform.

As I have been doing community presentations about extending Microsoft Teams with the Power Platform, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Today, we can already build low code apps with Power Apps, low code workflows with Power Automate and low code chat bots with Power Virtual Agents, and embed them in Teams.

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Soon all this will be even easier – you’ll be able to extend Teams with these low code tools without even leaving Teams. Need an app for that? Just click on the Power Apps icon in Teams and start building. Automate your notifications or approvals, or create an internal chatbot to check on leave requests or invoices? Done.

On top of all that, you will be able to create a table in Teams, which is a proper relational database that can handle around a million records. Think about the number of times you need to record some data in a table, that isn’t part of your main CRM or database system – you most likely go straight to Excel or create SharePoint lists – and while Excel and SharePoint are both awesome tools, neither one is a database. Sure, you can link lists and tables and get something approximating a database, but it’s not the real deal. Creating a relational database in Teams will be as easy as – add table, add columns, pick your data types, enter your data. Then you have your table living in your team, where you already work and collaborate. No lost spreadsheet saved in a shared drive somewhere, or duplicated across multiple personal drives where you have no chance of keeping your data straight.

The technology underneath this is a “lite” version of the extremely powerful Common Data Service, which has only been available under the full Power Apps / Power Automate licensing. This new relational database functionality embedded in Teams will be included with (selected, details to be announced) Teams licenses.

At the time of writing, there is still a lot of detail to be released about exactly what you’re getting, what you’ll be able to do, and how it all work. I’ll keep blogging on that as more information becomes public, so follow along if you’d like to learn more.

They say all publicity is good publicity. I really hope that proves to be the case here, for the sake of everyone involved. In the meantime, what we have here is something to look forward to – and we certainly need that right now. There are 75 million (and growing) daily active Microsoft Teams users, many of whom are only using Teams for chat and meetings, and don’t even know that it’s possible to do this kind of thing. The Power Platform world is about to get a whole lot bigger. The capability in Teams is about to get a whole lot broader.

That’s definitely something to look forward to.