The Now Virtual Agent app by ServiceNow can improve employee productivity with seamless self-service and faster case resolution.Ĥ51 Research’s recent Voice of the Enterprise: Workforce Productivity and Collaboration survey shows that 25% of respondents believe siloed information across different applications is the biggest obstacle to a team’s success. “This is a market requirement that has been building up for several years, largely due to the growing number of applications that knowledge workers (and increasingly, task and service workers as well) require to get their work done.” “At a high level, the platform-based approach reflects the need for more integration across business applications,” said Castanon. It’s an approach pioneered by Slack, which has benefitted from allowing customers to connect apps of their choice to the chat-based collaboration platform. Both vendorsare now seeking to enhance the value of their respective tools by tapping into external applications. Microsoft’s addition to Teams “mirrors” Zoom's own platform-based approach, said Raul Castanon, a senior analyst at 451 Research/S&P Global Market Intelligence. Zoom announced its "Zapps" integrations at the Zoomtopia conference last month, featuring a wider range of third-party applications, including Slack, Salesforce, Dropbox and Coda. The announcement follows rival Zoom's move to add added third-party integrations to its own video platform. That means co-workers discussing the progress of a project can quickly add a new action in Asana, for instance, without interrupting the conversation. Īlthough Microsoft already has some 700 or so third-party and Office 365 apps that integrate with Teams chat, the integrations for video meetings are new. They serve the same basic purpose, however as with traditional app integrations, Teams Apps for Meetings will let users carry out simple interactions without switching focus during a video meeting.
Microsoft’s own Forms app is also accessible and the company is encouraging developers to build their own integrations for Teams video, according to a Microsoft blog post Monday.
Microsoft Teams users can now access a range of third-party and custom applications during video meetings, removing the need to switch screens mid-conversation.Īmong the 20 apps available with Teams Apps for Meetings are task management apps from Asana and, polling tools Slido and Polly, and video interview software from HireVue and Talview.