Developers can now easily build bots for Microsoft Teams using Botkit support

Microsoft today announced full support for Botkit in Microsoft Teams. Botkit is leading developer tool for building chat bots, apps and custom integrations for major messaging platforms and it is in use by 10,000’s of bots right now. With Botkit support in Teams, developers can easily start building bots for internal use or customer-facing services. Using Botkit Studio, developers can have a bot up and running on their team in just a few minutes. Botkit for Microsoft Teams provides developers the following.

• Support for designing and building conversations in Botkit Studio that take advantage of the rich card formats and interactive features offered by Teams
• App package builder?—?configure your application’s options and create the required app package without hacking your own JSON files
• An extensible starter kit project filled with examples and customizable features?—?not just a bot, but an integrated example tab application, compose extension, and code demonstrating all of the Teams platform features
• Botkit Core extensions, including a Teams connector, a fully featured API client, and a range of helper functions that makes building for Teams much easier?—?and tons and tons of documentation. Learn more about it here.

Microsoft today also announced that ServiceNow is planning to deliver integrations with Microsoft Teams. Their new Office 365 Connector will trigger events occurring in ServiceNow with user notifications in Teams. Microsoft is also working on the following to improve developer collaboration on new feature development, communication on bugs and documenting issues.

• Add a Bitbucket Cloud tab showing pull requests for any repository you work with.
• Add a JIRA Cloud tab to your channel to display issues from any project in JIRA ServiceDesk, JIRA Core or JIRA Software.
• Add a GitHub tab to your channel showing issues and pull requests for any repository you work with. You also have the ability now to add a personal tab giving you an individualized view of issues and pull requests across all your repositories.

Developers can learn more about building for Microsoft Teams here.