Microsoft Teams Developer Portal App Manager gets new package editor for Copilot, other apps

I’ve said for a while now that the Microsoft Teams Developer Platform was a misnomer, and that slowly but surely it is expanding to take on developer-supporting roles outside of Microsoft Teams. Now, we have another example of that.

The Developer Portal (at dev.teams.microsoft.com) contains an app management tool which you can use to create and manage Microsoft Teams apps: essentially building out the manifest file that’s needed as well as zipping the manifest and icon files and handling the validation and submission processes.

There is now a new “App Package Editor” which is a file manager for the files inside a manifest zip. For a Microsoft Teams app, it’s always a manifest file and 2 icon files, so why is this needed? Well, there are other types of apps that contain different files.

For instance, to create a Copilot agent you need to add a JSON file describing the agents behaviour, plus an OpenAPI spec files for APIs you want to have available. (for more about this, see my series on building Copilot agents with API Plugins). Now, there is a way to create an app in the Developer Portal and add these extra files in.

Right now, functionality is a bit basic and is limited to uploading JSON, YAML and PNG files, creating new folders and editing / deleting items. However that’s enough to be able to add the additional files needed to create Declarative Agents, for instance.

To me, this is a clear indication that the Teams Developer Portal is expanding to support more than just Microsoft Teams apps, but also Copilot Agent apps and potentially other types too. Having a file manager for the files in an app manifest provides a lot of flexibility for the future as well, as opposed to abstracting and supporting just the known configuration files available today.

All that’s left is to update the name and URL. Copilot Developer Portal, anyone?!