Microsoft Teams Development linking to desktop apps

Question

In Outlook, excel and Word I’ve created context menus, which when chosen by the user, allows the user to jump to a desktop application (passing along the context of course as well). It all seems old school these days but think VSTO, Addins or even vba.

Is something like this possible from a Teams conversation?

EDIT - Example: In a conversation in MS Team John types a message to Fred "Hey Fred please look at file number 123456." Now currently Fred has to highlight and copy this number, open a Desktop app and paste the number to search for the information.

If John writes the same message as an EMAIL to Fred, then because Fred has my addin installed, the addin recognizes the number 123456 and Fred simply right clicks on the number and chooses a context menu. (The addin sends a message through a WCF connection to the Desktop app) The Desktop app springs up to the foreground and displays the file to Fred.

So far from my reading of MS Teams I only read and see things about the http protocol which is nice but I am hoping there is something more.

I do not understand your question fully. I have added a use case and example of how it works with Outlook. — darbid, May 04 '20 at 10:34
Advanced Threat Protection blocks unsafe protocols, so This will not work — Trinetra-MSFT, May 06 '20 at 08:51
So the answer is No? If I don't have a public website to which teams can send information to via the HTTP protocol there is nothing. — darbid, May 06 '20 at 11:41

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 09 '20 at 04:48

From what I can understand developing with Teams currently means web only addons/extension or whatever they call them now. Communication with native applications is not possible for developers, even Microsoft is still trying to link documents in Teams to their own desktop apps.

I never want to open the document in Teams, or in Office Online. I always want to use the native desktop program. Would be nice if there was a global setting so documents always opened in desktop applications. (Microsoft Teams UserVoice December 2017)

It appears that Microsoft Teams does not support any of the coding opportunities currently available for Outlook, Word or Excel as according to the comments above these are "Advanced Threat Protection blocks unsafe protocols".

Sadly web only addons/extension and the requirement for them to be centrally uploaded effectively makes things very difficult for people working within a corporate environment where there is an IT department who creates so much red tape that your application for something ends with a negative result. Gone are the days where people can code up something for a few people to use in their organization.

If you have landed here from a Google Search my suggestion would be to create a browser extension with a native host. You can do whatever it is you want with the Teams user interface and send the information through the native host to your desktop applications. This will not work with the Microsoft Teams App, however as this app is simply the website in a window it is possible that people will just use a browser anyway.

Microsoft Teams Development linking to desktop apps

1 Answers1

Linked