We built Microsoft Teams as a platform to bring together all of your workplace tools, apps, and services—whether or not we built them—to allow you to deliver better workday flow for you and your employees. A lot of you recognize the power of Teams, and you’ve been asking how to use Teams to its full advantage. Look no further. Today, we’re sharing ten of the latest Teams integrations you can use every day to simplify workflows, refocus your attention, and get back to working smarter—not harder. This is something our CEO, Satya Nadella, recently addressed in his interview on the future of communication at work with the Wall Street Journal.
Ten of the latest integrations to try in Teams
These ten integrations bring everything from customer feedback and employee polls to workflow and project management, into Teams, to make your apps work for you.
- Funnel customer feedback straight into Teams: Twitter As one of the largest social media platforms around, Twitter mostly needs no introduction. However, did you know it’s a great way to gather customer feedback? By integrating Twitter into Teams, you can set up alerts relevant to your company. So, when a customer tweets at your handle or uses your hashtag, it flows directly into Teams, where you can share or respond without stopping your workflow.
- Transform the way you work: ServiceNow ServiceNow delivers digital workflows that create great experiences and unlock productivity. The cloud-based Now Platform transforms old, manual ways of working into modern digital workflows, so employees and customers get what they need when they need it. Read more about the ServiceNow integration for Virtual Agent, a chatbot that helps build conversational workflows to resolve common ServiceNow actions, as well as IntegrationHub, which lets anyone break down development backlog with codeless workflows in an easy-to-use interface.
- Get organized with your very own automated administrative assistant:Zoom.ai lives inside your chat, email inbox, and calendar to help you offload and automate tasks. You interact with it by typing commands in a chat window, where it can schedule Teams meetings for you, brief you on your day, send and receive reminders, and create documents when you need them. It works for you, where you work. Watch the Zoom.ai video to learn more.
- Organize any of life’s projects: Trello is a project management software whose boards, lists, and cards enable you to organize and prioritize your projects in a flexible way. By integrating in Teams, you can see your Trello assignments, tasks, and notifications and have conversations about them—without leaving Teams. A fun way to bring together project management and project collaboration. Watch the Trello video to learn more.
- Run polls in tandem with your conversations: Polly is a survey app that lets you create surveys in Teams. You can quickly create polls in your Teams channels and view results in real-time. You have the option to create multiple choice polls, freeform polls, or a mixture of both. Turn on comments and you’ve got yourself a full discussion board. Get the answers you need without disrupting workflows or clogging inboxes. Visit Polly for Microsoft Teams to learn more.
- Celebrate your organization’s culture and values: Disco is a solution that rallies your entire company around your core values. It makes it easy to give public shout-outs and congratulate your colleagues in real-time. So, next time a team member delivers a project ahead of schedule or demonstrates one of your team or company values in their work, pay it forward by giving them Disco “points” in Teams. They’ll feel supported and, who knows, maybe repay your appreciation. Watch the Disco video to learn more.
- Help teams deliver value to customers faster by releasing earlier, more often, and more iteratively: Jira Software is a leading software development tool used by agile teams to plan, track, and release great software. Integrate Jira with Teams for a seamless way to visualize the important things like development velocity, workloads, bug resolution, and app performance all in real-time—from Teams. This makes it easy to inject insights into group collaboration without disrupting workflows. Learn more about Microsoft Teams Jira Connector.
- Bring more structure to online brainstorming: MindMeister is an online mind-mapping tool that lets you capture, develop, and share ideas visually. And by integrating in Teams, you can take notes, brainstorm, visualize project plans, and easily show connections between ideas all while discussing details with your team in the chat. Read Create and Manage All Your Mind Maps in Microsoft Teams! to learn more. Bring creative work to teamwork: Adobe Creative Cloud
- Adobe Creative Cloud gives you the world’s best apps and services for video, design, photography, and the web including Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CC, InDesign CC, Premiere Pro CC, and more. Integrate with Teams to bring your creative work and teamwork together. You can share work, get feedback, and stay up-to-date on tasks and actions. Read Adobe XD Adds Integration with Microsoft Teams—Creativity meets collaboration to learn more.
- Build software in a way that works best for you: GitHub is the platform where developers work together, solve challenging problems, and create the world’s most important technologies. Whether you are a student, hobbyist, consultant, or enterprise professional, the GitHub integration in Teams allows you to create, share, and ship the best code possible.
Microsoft Office brings you new privacy controls
Earlier this week, Julie Brill, Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft, published a blog that outlined Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to privacy and provided details on the direction we are taking as a company. In her blog, Julie introduced principles that guide our approach to increasing transparency and customer control over data collected by Microsoft’s major products.
We are excited to announce that earlier this week we released an update to Office that reflects these principles.
The office is a connected experience
The way we use technology to be productive at work and at home is changing. We work more on the go, we use more than one device to complete our tasks, and we often collaborate as part of a team—even when that team is our family and friends. At Microsoft, we’re committed to providing you with the best-in-class applications and experiences to meet these modern needs, while respecting your privacy and keeping you in control of your data.
We continue to introduce new and exciting capabilities to Office to help you create, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. Sometimes it’s as simple as helping you find a document you wrote a week ago, or helping you find the perfect image for a school report. Or maybe your team needs to collaborate and communicate on a project in real-time across different devices. Office can help you create professional-looking presentations by suggesting design layouts for your PowerPoint slides, and it can also help you find key insights in complex data sets.
To deliver these experiences, Office uses the power of the Microsoft Cloud. Like any other connected service or website, required service data must be shared between your computer and Microsoft to enable these features.
For example: Perhaps you would like PowerPoint to provide live subtitles as you present and even translate your words into a different language. To transcribe and translate your spoken words, PowerPoint sends a recording of your voice to our Speech and Translation service, where it’s automatic machine transcribed and translated. The generated text is returned to your computer so that PowerPoint can display it on the screen in (almost) real-time. Your voice and words are used only to do the transcription and translation you’ve asked us to do.
If you want to learn more about which connected experiences are available to you in Office, please read Connected experiences in Office.
You’re in control of cloud-connected experiences
We understand the importance of keeping you and your organization in control of connected experiences when working in Office apps. With this update, you now have settings that allow you to disable or re-enable the following types of connected experiences, including:
- Experiences that analyze your content. Experiences that use your Office content to provide you with design recommendations, editing suggestions, data insights, and similar features. For example, PowerPoint Designer or Editor in Word.
- Experiences that download online content. Experiences that allow you to search and download online content, including templates, images, 3D models, videos, and reference materials to enhance your documents. For example, Office templates or PowerPoint QuickStarter.
- Other connected experiences. Experiences such as document collaboration can be also turned off by disconnecting the Office desktop apps from the Microsoft Cloud.
Some services are essential to how Office apps function and cannot be turned off. For example: syncing your mailbox in Outlook, authenticating and verifying your Office license, and determining if Office is up to date.
Although these improvements have come to Office on Windows first, in the coming months, similar controls and experiences will be introduced in Office on other platforms.
If Office is connected to your work or school account, your IT administrator is empowered to make choices about which connected experiences are available to you in your organization. To learn more about improvement to the IT controls and the options available, please see Overview of privacy controls for Office 365 ProPlus.
Keeping Office secure, up to date, and performing as expected
Our customers choose Office because of its strong track record of capability, quality, security, reliability, and compatibility. Just as with our cloud-backed experiences, we use data to keep the Office apps secure, up to date, performing as expected, and to make product improvements.
For this purpose, we collect diagnostic data to detect, diagnose, and rapidly address issues before they become large-scale problems or cause security risks. If one of our apps runs too slowly, or has some other error, we want to know about it as quickly as possible, so we can work on fixing it. This diagnostic data helps us keep your Office working the way it should.
Consistent with the data collection framework outlined in Julie’s blog, there are two levels of diagnostic data for Office desktop applications:
- Required data—The minimum data necessary to help keep Office secure, up to date, and performing as expected on the device it’s installed on. For example, required data is collected when we update Office on your device. To ensure the update packages are downloaded and installed correctly, we collect information about the success (or failure) of this operation. Or when you add a new email account to Outlook, we collect required diagnostic data about the success of adding this new account. Increased rates of failure could indicate a change made by your email provider or regression in support of this provider in our software.
- Optional data—This is data that is collected in addition to required data and only with your consent. If collected, optional data helps us detect, diagnose, and fix issues even faster; and it helps us make improvements to meet your productivity needs now and in the future. Optional data, for example, is collected on whether files are saved locally or in the cloud; this helps us to better understand our customers’ storage preferences. Or tracking the number of times a feature is used to better understand the ways our customers interact with new Office features. We generally use optional diagnostic data to learn about the preferences across a large set of customers. We continually work to improve Office to make it work better for you and the rest of our customers. We appreciate you choosing to provide optional diagnostic data to make this possible.
For more information about diagnostic data in Office, and how to control which category you provide, see Diagnostic data in Office. If you’re using a work or school account, your IT administrator will have additional options to disable the collection of diagnostic data and may have made some choices about options available to you.
Regardless of whether you stay with required data or opt into optional data, the diagnostic data we receive doesn’t include your name or email address, the content of your files, or information about apps unrelated to Office. We take great precautions to ensure your privacy, including how we handle your diagnostic data. Our system creates a unique alphanumeric ID that it associates with the diagnostic data before it leaves your computer. Although unique, this ID by itself cannot be mapped back to any individual person. We use this ID to help us differentiate between an issue happening on 100 different devices or 100 instances of the same issue happening on a single device.
We want to be open and transparent about the data we collect to detect, diagnose, and fix issues. We created a free Diagnostic Data Viewer, where you can see the diagnostic data sent to Microsoft. For details, read Using the Diagnostic Data Viewer with Office.
Get started with Teams
Bringing these apps and tools together in Teams is a great way to bring the focus back to your workflow. They’re easy to integrate and offer something for everyone, whether you’re developing software, managing projects, or gathering customer feedback. And with new apps going live on Teams every day, your next productivity superpower is only a few clicks away. Check the Teams Store today so you don’t miss out!
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