Home > News

Microscoft Teams Adds Ability to Use More Apps in Meetings

By Laura Tucker
News Microsoft Teams Apps Featured

Computing has taken many exciting twists and turns, overhauling the industry each time. Yet, the trajectory the tech industry took this year was quite unexpected. The global health crisis has forced many people to barricade themselves in their homes and work from home, which has led to an increase in remote collaboration through tools such as Zoom. Microsoft Teams is making an obvious play for that traffic, adding more workforce apps and power tools for use during meetings.

More Apps in Microsoft Teams

This week Microsoft added apps and power tools for use with Teams. It has also added the data-management platform, “Project Oakdale,” renaming it “Microsoft Dataverse.” This makes it possible for the software to expand beyond collaboration and move toward being a centralized location for work.

This is where you can tell that Microsoft truly wants to increase its users. It already had 700 apps in the Teams Apps Store. 700. But that wasn’t enough, so now they’ve added 20 more.

News Microsoft Teams Apps Login

Adding Asana was a natural, as of course a collaboration software could be improved by adding access to an app that manage’s a team’s projects and tasks. Learning that Microsoft Forms was added makes you question why it wasn’t there before. SurveyMonkey, of course, makes sense too.

But some of the other app names added at first glance seem like they were scraping the bottom of the barrel. They are just not well-known slam dunks like Asana. The names include Buncee, Monday.com, Pigeonhole, and Talview Inc. A Google search turns up information, though, that shows just why they were added to a collaboration software.

Microsoft is also adding the Power Platform app. This provides tools to build and use apps, chatbots, and workflows to use within Microsoft Teams. It’s a studio to more or less allow you to build your own workspace. The Power Automate app is a workflow designer that allows you to automate routine tasks. The Power Virtual Agents app lets you create and use low-code bots.

News Microsoft Teams Apps Laptop

Competition for Collaboration

Of course, collaborating via the Internet was always big business, but it’s grown exponentially in 2020. “Zoom” has become part of daily life and pop culture just as “Google” has. And Zoom has a lock on more than just business meetings. It’s being used by family and friends to keep in touch while social distancing and also being used by elementary and high school students to learn remotely.

Microsoft Teams is clearly not trying to tap into that demographic. With the tools that they have added, they’re competing for the business users. They know what they’re doing, having added 115 million daily active users in the past six months, an increase of 50 percent. It will be interesting to see if fellow collaboration apps, such as Slack, move in to grab some of that business back.

Read on to learn what happened early on in the health crisis when the excessive demand caused Microsoft Teams to go down for two hours.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.