Microsoft Teams: Turn on public preview features

Last May, Microsoft launched a Public Developer Preview of Microsoft Teams, allowing developers to test the upcoming features of the product. Since it is a public preview, anyone can have access to it and no NDA is required to use it. Although it is quite simple, I’ve seen a lot of people ask how to enable the Public Developer Preview, so here are the steps you need to follow.

Step 1: Enable sideloading of apps for Microsoft Teams

Assuming you have already enabled Microsoft Teams in your tenant, you still need to make sure the sideloading option is enabled. You can do so by following the steps below:

  1. Sign in to Office 365 with your administrator account
  2. Select Admin to go to the Office 365 Admin Center
  3. In the left side menu, open the Settings group and click on Services & add-ins
  4. From the list of services and add-ins, select Microsoft Teams
  5. On the Microsoft Teams settings screen, make sure both Allow external apps in Microsoft Teams and Allow sideloading of external apps are switched on, and select Save.

Step 2: Enable developer preview in the Microsoft Teams client

To enable the public developer preview features, follow the steps below:

  1. Open the Microsoft Teams client application
  2. On the left navigation bar, open the settings menu (click your profile picture)
  3. Click About and, in the flyout, click on Developer preview

The Microsoft Teams client will re-launch immediately and, after it’s running again, you’ll have access to the new features. To turn it off, simply follow the same steps and disable it.

What new features are included in the Public Preview?

These will probably evolve with the next releases, much like with Windows Insiders builds. As of May 2017, the features included in the Public Preview version are:

  • Support for Apps in Microsoft Teams
  • Discover Apps gallery
  • Compose Extensions
  • App notifications
  • Actionable messages in connectors
  • Support for bots to update messages (after they’ve been delivered)

You can keep up-to-date on these in the Public Preview Features page.