I won't sugar coat it, the Microsoft Teams store is a new low, even for Microsoft. Let's face it for years the Microsoft UC strategy has be mismanaged and directionless, this is an understatement. Products have been killed off with little notice, and without any suitable replacement in site. Microsoft Teams is largely smoke and mirrors. Yes there are a lot of Microsoft 365 licenses that come with Teams, and technically millions of users that have it, because it came with what they needed to send and receive email. Survey the landscape and you'll find a very small few customers who have found it to be a suitable replacement for their UC needs. I talked to customers every week who are "migrating to Teams" and a shocked and horrified to find out the gaping holes that exist. The one that is glaring to our organization is the lack of developer support or APIs. 3 years ago we were told not to worry that when the shocking announcement that Skype for Business was a "dead man walking" that all the same tools for developers would land on the new mystery product. To date they haven't, and there seems to be little appetite from a company that once touted 98% of their sales were attributed to their developer partners.
Enter the snow globe partner approach, where every year they throw away what a few figured out how to navigate, and start from scratch. Partner Center is the current iteration, where all the pay for Outlook and Teams apps now got stripped, and a few were allowed to migrate to the new store. Simple enough, we created a Teams wallboard app for monitoring a group of users presence. Something you really can't do in Teams, though it was and is a basic function in every competing phone system.
Upon completing the app, and a few weeks of testing, it seemed logical to submit it to the Teams store. The app is simple, reliable, and should have been an easy value prop to fly right into a ghost town of retched store apps.
Problem 1
Microsoft has little to do with the store. Of course, they farm it out of the low bid Indian firm HCL, who works in the middle of the night if you live in the US only. They decide if your app has value, having no clue about any business landscape, and shockingly no knowledge of how a contact or call center would work, despite it being a primary source of revenue for them. The worst part is their hardware, having done a Teams meeting to show the app to them I couldn't believe how bad their connection was. I haven't seen internet like that since the last 90s. And of course when it sucks, they fail you because of their garbage environment.
Problem 2
Teams has an App Studio app, which helps generate a manifest. This is great, and things are fairly logical. The rub comes with the 3rd party HCL, since they go against the guidelines on the developer site, and contradict several things, that honestly have no effect on the app, but seems to give them busy work to justify whatever low bid revenue they get. For example if you pick an Accent Color in the App Studio they will reject your app because your icon bordered by the accent color doesn't match your icon. Seriously.
Problem 3
Let's say you submit your app was we did, and store (HCL 3rd party) rejects it with 1 issue. You fix the non-issue and resubmit. Now it comes back with 4 issues, none of which were there the first time. You repeat the process a few times, and now you have a dozen issues, some of which are beyond stupid, like the outline icon which is supposed to be white, doesn't match the app icon, which is supposed to be color. They will say the colors don't match.
This would fail every Microsoft app as well, as you see the Planner icons above. It seems the vendor is so bad they are unable to read or comprehend even the most basic instructions they have from Microsoft. Also any icon that looks like a person or people is instantly rejected because they feel it would be too confusing for users that they would think it was the "Teams" icon despite it's fixed position.
Problem 4
Before you know it, you are up at 3am doing Teams meetings with them, trying to explain the basics of software development, how Teams works etc, to someone who isn't qualified to do anything, and doesn't have access to actual Teams accounts. It's truly shocking to see how this is being run behind the curtain.
Problem 5
At some point in a crazy scheme to turn a profit you may want a customer to pay you for your app. Not so fast, despite partner center having a section you fill out about how your app has in app purchases, according to HCL the low bid vendor, you app will be rejected if you try to take payment inside it. Instead you must write something that exposes a man in the middle attack and threatens you PCI compliance if you want money. Yeah they are advocating for that!
The Decision
After a month of this you really start to question if you actually want your app in the store. Frankly, most users probably don't frequent it, because the lack of quality. The task switching experience in Teams is terrible, it takes us back to the days of DOS. Luckily you don't really need Teams, since most of the heavy lifting is done by the MS Graph team, you can run your "teams" app better in a web browser.
Conclusions
Microsoft has hit a new low, and that's impressive given the downward trend of their communications play over the last 5 years.
Don't assume because you got Teams with Outlook your business will survive if you try to use it as your phone system.
