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Collaborative apps

Collaborative Apps is a pattern for enabling conversations within line-of-business applications. Users can have chats about business entities, such as purchase orders or court hearings. In-context chat improves collaboration and enables faster decision making. Chats can be embedded in any application. Low-code options include Teams apps, Power Apps, and Dynamics 365 apps. High-code apps, such as web and thick-client apps are also supported.

Example: Supporting customers via embedded chat

A manufacturer of heavy machinery wanted to enable Teams conversations within their dealer portal and knowledge base. Using the Embedded Chat and Graph Notification Broker capabilities, the customer added a high-quality chat experience to their portal. Customers chat from within the portal, while company employees chat from within Microsoft Teams.

The chat experience was built using the following components:

General Collaborative App Guidance

Engineering Collaborative Apps, which often includes Teams and Power App development (both part of Microsoft 365), introduces unique constraints to traditional software development. Software engineers face several constraints when they take Collaborative Apps into production. They are tenancy considerations, identity mapping, application manifests, embedding, side-loading, and application governance. FusionOps will evolve to provide extra guidance on these constraints and provide solutions to streamline engineering around them.

Collaborative App Solutions

Collaborative Apps solutions fall into three categories:

  • Accelerators help engineers get past core technical challenges in developing Collaborative Apps. They are working code samples that must be integrated with other applications to realize value.
  • Solutions are working solutions bundled in a sample client app. They need integration with business applications to create an end-to-end solution.
  • App Templates are ready to deploy solutions. They have all components to be deployed to a test environment but will need to be customized to suit the enterprise's needs.

Below are solutions to unblock common business scenarios or make technical enhancements more turnkey.

They are organized by Solution Type in the Collaborative Apps capability map. For example, NetPassage is an Engineering Accelerator, which helps withNetwork Security (Tunneling)to enable Teams-bots to communicate across firewalls. The Praise App is a completeApplication Template* ready to try out in a Teams environment.

Collaborative Apps Solution Map

The solution map below shows the solutions by its type as described above. As of July 2023, all the solutions are available except for Project Setup, which will be available in December 2023.

Collaborative Apps Solution Map

Table of Solutions

Title Description Type
Tunneling Alternative for Teams-Bots Alternative to NGrok to support endpoints within a private network Accelerator
Deploying Bots in Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) Script that enables scaling Audio bots in VMSS Accelerator
Embedded Chat Control Enables users to collaborate with Teams users from within a webapp Solution
Graph Notification Broker Enables applications including PowerApps to subscribe to Graph notifications Solution
Praise App Facilitates employees and managers to recognize colleagues' effort Application
Teams4Justice Solution for online court hearings Application
Appointment Manager Virtual Consultation for Customer Service Application