You can add apps to Microsoft Teams to enable integration between software and services you use everyday and the chats and channels within Teams. You can use apps to add content to your messages, add tabs to team channels, or even work directly with a service without leaving the app. No matter how you use them, apps can be a great way to get more done from directly within Teams.

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Functionality

What Teams apps do and where they appear depends on how they were built. Please note that the examples listed below are in no way comprehensive; there are so many apps available in Teams, it’s not possible to cover them all.

Bots

Some apps, like Wrike, RingCentral, or Freshdesk have a bot you can chat with to perform certain commands, like starting a RingCentral Video meeting, or turning Wrike notifications on or off. Bots may also be used only for notifications that will appear in the same place you see your other chats. You can identify a bot by its icon; while another person has a circular icon, a bot’s is hexagonal.

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Channel Tabs

Some apps can be used to add tabs to team channels. Some examples of apps that can do this include Wiki, OneNote, Planner, and SharePoint. These tabs will usually bring you to the app’s instance specific to the team the channel is in. For instance, if your team has a shared OneNote notebook, a OneNote tab added to the channel will take you there, or the SharePoint tab would bring you to do the SharePoint site specific to that channel.

Adding Content to Messages

Apps like YouTube, Forms, BowerBI, Vivia Learning, and Praise can let you add content to your messages. You can access any apps that can do this by using the toolbar below the field where you type your messages. If you don’t see the app you want to use in that toolbar, you can select More Options (ellipses icon) to choose from all the apps you have installed.

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Sending Notifications to Channels

Some apps can send notifications to channels. These apps are called Connectors. You can add connectors by right clicking on a channel’s name in the Teams tab and selecting Connectors. These apps are usually news feeds or social media services, like Yammer, RSS, Bing News, or Forms.

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Personal View

You can get a personalized view of any app you have installed by selecting More Options (ellipses icon) from the lefthand sidebar in the Teams app. From the panel that pops up, you can click on an app to open it, or type what you’re looking for where it says Find an app.

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Adding New Apps

To add new apps to Teams, click the Apps icon  in the lower left corner of the Teams window.

This will open a screen that lets you search for apps by name or browse by topic.

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Note that apps have to be approved in order for you to be able to install them, so sometimes you may come across an app that you won’t be able to add to Teams. If that’s the case, you can reach out to the IT Helpdesk ([email protected]) and ask us to allow it.

For an overview of how to work with apps in Teams, check out this video from Microsoft: