SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Part 2

Episodes in the SharePoint Teams What To Use When Series

  1. SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Part 1
  2. SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Part 2
  3. SharePoint & Teams: What To Use When Part 3

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Use Case

Users need to complete a structured business process (e.g., time off request, travel plan, on-boarding, new asset request, check request, etc.)

Example scenarios of structured business processes:

  • Third-party solutions for process automation Ex: ServiceNow, GitHub, Nintex Workflows

  • Power Platform Integrations or other Microsoft 365 apps Ex: Planner, Dataverse

  • Solutions built using SharePoint artifacts Ex: Lists and libraries in combination with each other

  • Customized solutions created with extensibility development tools

Teams as an Application Integration Surface

Companies are spending more time in Teams over the last couple years because of the virtual and remote work environments that allows for messaging and collaboration. One of the reasons Teams has been so successful is because you can bring in external applications and use them within the Team’s context. By having all of those different applications available, you can bring external application work inside Teams, which is something you cannot do in SharePoint. This supports your end users not leaving the flow of work where they are already productive.

The app bar along the left navigation of Teams is a new area to focus on for a good user experience. These apps should be higher value items which can be implemented from the admin for all users. The end user can also drag and drop their apps to best support their personal productivity.

Extensibility Options: SharePoint

Single App-Part Page

If you build a SPFx solution, you can target it as something that would take over the whole page. For a new page, there is a hidden tab called apps, which contains any of the activated SPFx solutions in that site collection that are targeted to single app-part pages.
Ex: Microsoft 365 Learning Pathways solution

Web parts in SharePoint

Solutions can be embedded as web parts in pages.

Microsoft Viva Connections

Creating adaptive card extensions (or ACEs). The dashboard cards can be put into a dashboard page which is then surfaced on a page, like a homepage, in a new preview web part called a dashboard web part. There is a limit to 1 dashboard web part per site and ACEs can only be used on home sites. Recently announced, you can have more than 1 home site. These ACEs can also be audience targeted through the ACE configuration.
Ex: World clock

Extensibility Options: Teams

Personal App/“Viva Connections”

Our web parts can also be personal apps. This is along that left navigation app bar we were talking about earlier. The admin can pin things to the rail, but the solutions can also just be available through the ellipses on the app bar.
Ex: COVID Attestation App

Teams Tab

A SPFx web part surfaced as a tab in Teams. If you have a business process that is extensible to a team, or multiple teams you can add that as a tab in Teams for them.

Resources

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