Microsoft Teams: Now You Can Use It With GitHub In This New Public Beta

Microsoft-owned GitHub has announced the public beta of a new GitHub integration with Microsoft Teams. 

The public beta means developers using GitHub now have the option of adding the GitHub app to the Microsoft Teams app, just as they've been able to do with the Slack chat for several years. 

GitHub and Slack teamed up in 2018 to bring GitHub to Slack to make it easier for teams to track GitHub activity in Slack channels. 

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The GitHub and Microsoft Teams integration, which is maintained by GitHub, offers similar functionality as the Slack integration but for Teams channels. 

"The GitHub integration for Microsoft Teams gives you and your teams full visibility into your GitHub projects right in your Teams channels, where you generate ideas, triage issues and collaborate with other teams to move projects forward," GitHub explains. 

GitHub users can install the GitHub preview app from the Microsoft Teams app store within the Teams app. Users need to link GitHub and Teams accounts by authenticating to GitHub using a @github sign-in command. 

GitHub for Teams allows users to track and create new commits, pull requests, issues, status updates, comments and code reviews. 

Github users can subscribe and unsubscribe to notifications for an organization or a repository's activity to keep notifications relevant. 

GitHub highlights a feature that lets users 'unfurl' GitHub links to give others in a Microsoft Teams channel more information when they share links to GitHub activities, such as pull requests. 

The app groups notifications for pull requests and issues under a parent card as replies. The parent card shows the latest of these issues along with information about the title, assignees, reviewers, labels and checks. 

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The GitHub and Teams integration should be good news for the portion of GitHub's 30 million developer users who also rely on Teams for collaboration. 

Microsoft meanwhile has been busy releasing new features for Microsoft Teams, which as of April had 75 million daily active users. The latest feature it released for Teams was the new Lists app, which offers Teams users a spreadsheet format with a focus on collaboration and completing tasks.