Better Together: PowerApps & Microsoft Teams to share more data, drive better experiences

Exciting news from the Microsoft 365 Roadmap – which tracks all planned development work for the Microsoft 365 platform – with a new feature coming to enable Microsoft PowerApps to have more contextual information about the Microsoft Teams teams they are added to.

The idea is that any custom apps built in PowerApps and which are then added to channels in Microsoft Teams will be able to know what channels they are running in, presumably by referencing some variables.

Why is this good? It means that PowerApps developers will be able to customise the experience for the specific channel – this might include defaulting to showing specific information, restricting functionality, or changing the look and feel. Potentially, if the Channel ID is made available (we don’t know yet), then it would be possible for the PowerApp to go to Microsoft Graph and look up more information about the Channel, such as membership, latest messages etc.

This can only help drive the adoption of no/low-code solutions for the workplace, which (for me) is exciting to see happening in organisations everywhere. Shameless plug, I’m actually going to be talking in more detail about this on an upcoming webinar (free to register) if stuff like this interests you.

The feature is set for release this month, which is pretty aggressive as it’s only just shown up on the roadmap. When it comes, it looks like it’ll come to all standard tenants, but likely not GCC or other specialist tenants immediately.