March 30, 2021
I designed and shipped a Brightidea integration for Microsoft Teams that lets people capture ideas without leaving the conversation, turning any Teams message into a tracked idea so good thinking doesn’t get lost in the scroll. To pressure-test it right before launch, the Engineering Lead and I entered it in Microsoft’s Teams App Development Challenge 2021 on behalf of Brightidea.
We were just wrapping up our first complete build of the integration when the review team from MS let us know this hackathon was 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
We didn’t place, but that was never really the point. Forcing the app through a public submission sharpened our thinking, materials, and messaging right before the internal and external launches, which is exactly what I wanted out of it. The integration shipped alongside a new Idea Box free trial.
Using the Devpost platform as a hackathon participant was also an interesting exercise, 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.