As Microsoft 365 continues to gain traction across organizations of all sizes, so does the need for custom applications to automated and solve an almost endless amount of use cases. Its never been a better time to dive into the world of building applications for Microsoft’s vast productivity ecosystem.
In most cases the app idea and how to go about solving it is the most difficult and time consuming part of the project. Getting an environment up and running to develop, deploy and test against should not be getting in the way of your next great app idea.
For a few years now Microsoft has given developers great tools for building solutions atop Microsoft 365, however getting an environment deployed and running has always been time consuming and at times frustrating. Microsoft listened to the community’s feedback and has turned what was a dreadful experience into a simple friction-less affair.
Instant Sandbox
The instant sandbox is a new way to get a complete Microsoft 365 developer environment. Instead of making you to set up each of your apps and install each data pack individually, Microsoft packaged them all together in a pre-loaded Microsoft 365 E5 subscription with 25 users and 16 sample users.
This is a game changer, these sandbox environments are made ahead of time and delivered to you instantly. No more doing a ton of setup or waiting around for things to be provisioned and deployed.
What’s included?
The instant sandbox comes pre-loaded with 16 sample users, with sample content so you can model a wide range of scenarios and use cases. The sample content includes mail, calendar and chats. There are also sample teams, channels and tabs.
Use Cases
Changes are organizations can find a solution to their needs by using existing tools within Microsoft 365. Creating flows and leveraging power automate will solve hundreds of scenarios. However there are experiences which simply can’t be achieved with the bundled apps.
Let’s say your organization wants to create tasks in Planner based on a information from an in-house application. For example, when a client’s usage behavior changes for the better or worse. You can identify the team responsible for client relationships, create a task in their planner board to follow up. Say usage has dropped 25% you might want to reach out and figure out if they are experiencing problems with your system or the flip side, usage has increased and perhaps its time to have a conversation about re-aligning services, etc.
This is just one of the use cases, but hopefully it gives you an idea of what is possible.
If you are ready to start building amazing experiencing leveraging Microsoft 365 head over to Microsoft 365 Dev Central to sign up and begin playing around in your very own instant sandbox.
