Get Together

INSPIRATION

Our company relies on Teams to move business forward in real time. That’s because everything we do starts with a message - whether it's an idea, a project timeline, a quick decision or a meeting request. Unfortunately, while everything starts with a message, not everything can be easily achieved with one… 🤔

Time-after-time our project teams agreed to meet over Teams, but whether it was due to different calendars, different time zones, different organizations, or different preferences, we found ourselves sending endless back-and-forth messages simply trying to schedule time. 😩

And when we asked around, we found out that we weren’t the only ones. In fact, the average employee wastes 4-5 hours per week just scheduling. That’s over 1 BILLION hours in lost productivity across Team’s 280 million users each week! 🤯

Despite this problem and the many apps already available, there wasn’t an automated, message-first, scheduling app for Teams…until now! 🎉

WHAT IT DOES

Get Together is the fastest, easiest way to schedule directly in Microsoft Teams. 🏎 💨

Simply add Get Together to a group chat, tell it what you want to schedule with a bot mention, and our patent pending scheduling algorithm will immediately interpret message context, triangulate calendar availability, and find the best overall time for the group in just seconds! 💥

Get Together will even place the event on each individual’s calendar and automatically set up a Teams Meeting link, so no one ever has to leave the conversation to send an invite! 📅

HOW WE BUILT IT

Get Together's Teams App is built on top of our patent-pending scheduling algorithm that leverages a proprietary natural language processing model to enable instant, broad-based, in-message scheduling. 🤓

During the Hackathon, we connected the “scheduling brain” of the Get Together API directly to our new Teams app in order to create a seamless user experience. 🧠

We used the VS Code Teams Toolkit to build and deploy our solution with all the necessary scopes, permissions, and Azure resources for our app to function in any workspace. 💃 🕺🏽

CHALLENGES WE RAN INTO

Our first challenge was on the technical side. None of our team had built a Teams app before and we didn’t have strong prior experience with Typescript, so just setting up the environment and getting a feel for how things connected was step one. ✅

Learning the nuances of Teams app interactivity was a natural challenge, particularly when it came to things like figuring out how to progress through deployment environments. Fortunately, the VS Code Teams Toolkit is AMAZING and we were able to learn everything we needed by just using that and reading through the docs…and maybe checking in on an occasional Stack Overflow forum. 😆

Our second challenge was on the consumer side ensuring that new users could easily onboard and get started using the app right away. To this end, we spent focused time on the Personal Tab onboarding experience, tailoring the messages displayed to each part of the user’s journey with the app! 🙌

ACCOMPLISHMENTS WE'RE PROUD OF

Our product does in fact schedule in seconds, and we use it internally on a daily basis! 🤗

Several other companies have shown interest as well, and we even have our first enterprise pilot client ready to get started once we’ve cleared App Source! 🤝

WHAT WE LEARNED

Microsoft Teams apps are incredibly flexible in how they allow developers to design the user experience! Leaning in during the hackathon taught us that we have a huge opportunity to help more companies schedule seamlessly in Teams, especially with the recent rollout of cross-organization collaboration via Teams Connect! 👏

WHAT'S NEXT FOR GET TOGETHER

While we’re proud of what we were able to accomplish in just a few weeks during the hackathon, we are definitely not done working on our Teams app! 💪

On the product side, we plan to ship channel functionality for the app on the next release as well as an app tab that works in group and channel environments to quickly display upcoming events relative to the participants! 📦

On the sales and consumer side, we are actively working to set up pilots and already have an enterprise customer ready to try it out as soon as it is published in App Source! In just a few weeks, scaling our Teams solution has become our startup’s top priority. Let’s goooo! 🔥