Microsoft Teams App Development Challenge 2021

Published

March 30, 2021

Earlier this month along with the Engineering Lead I have been working with, I submitted an app to Microsoft’s Teams App Development Challenge 2021 on behalf of Brightidea.

Brightidea for Microsoft Teams on Devpost

We were just about done with our first cut of the integration when the review team from MS let us know this hackathon was currently accepting submissions on Devpost. Creating the submission didn’t take much additional work, and we thought this might help get us some exposure (especially if we placed) since the integration launch would also coincide with a new Idea Box free trial.

You can check out our submission on Devpost.

The first version of our app allows ideas to be captured directly from messages in Teams so that they don’t get lost or forgotten. Brightidea lets you capture, manage, and track ideas across your organization so that the best ideas can win. With an always-on digital suggestion box for collecting ideas, teams are empowered to submit ideas when and where it is convenient for them, at their desks or on the go. Brightidea gives you everything you need to collect, manage, and track the success of your innovation process

Capture ideas in Teams
Capture ideas to Brightidea directly from a Teams message
Push notifications
Idea details are automatically captured including any attached images & files, and users can make adjustments as needed before submitting
Link team members between Teams and Brightidea
Users can be automatically or manually linked between Teams and Brightidea at the time of submission
Push notifications
Brightidea links sent in Teams chats will automatically populate rich previews

Alas, we didn’t end up winning, but it was a good experience that made our app that much better by helping us polish our thinking, materials, and messaging before our internal & external product releases.

As a side note, it was also an interesting exercise to use the Devpost platform as a hackathon participant, considering we offer similar tools in our Hack app. The main difference is that our platform is built primarily for running challenges within a company, whereas Devpost is public.