Microsoft Teams is a rising power in the K-12 LMS market. Many schools already use Azure Active Directory to manage access to Office 365 apps. Due to Microsoft's entrenched position in education, it makes sense for districts to adopt its learning management system. Plus, Microsoft Teams for Education is a free offering for teacher, students, and the districts that use Office 365.

Because of the rapid growth of Microsoft Teams for Education, schools are looking for applications that can integrate with their Microsoft Teams environment. Integrating your app with Microsoft Teams does have its challenges. You should keep the following in mind when building an integration with Microsoft Teams for Education.

No LTI® Support

Unlike other major learning management systems, Microsoft Teams does not support the LTI standard. Third-party apps can only integrate with Microsoft Teams through the education API in Microsoft Graph.

API Beta Releases

Much of the Microsoft Graph education API is still in beta. In fact, the parts of the API that involve handling the creation of assignments in Microsoft Teams is still in beta.  The beta APIs may be changed in the future, so any integrations that currently use them may break if they are updated. Microsoft advises developers to not use these APIs in production environments, since they can change without advance notice.

These challenges are just a subset of some of the issues you could run into while integrating with Microsoft Teams. LMS integrations are usually not as straight-forward as they might seem at first. In fact, you should take into accounts the differences and quirks of each platform when you're building our your own integrations.

(Since writing this article, Microsoft Teams has released Microsoft Graph v1.0 API.)

Read More on Microsoft Teams

Here are other articles we’ve written on Microsoft Teams to help you on your integration journey:

If you're looking for a partner who can help guide you through developing LMS integrations (like these), then let’s introduce ourselves. We’re Edlink!