Bots, Webhooks, Teams and Message Formatting - Oh My!

Cisco Live! is here, and after a breakthrough event in Berlin for the Collaboration business, we’re super excited to land in Las Vegas and share what’s new with our partners in the U.S.

Just this morning we rolled out  a bunch of new features on the Spark for Developers site:

• Bots -  While many of you have been building chat bots for months, we’ve now made it super easy to create bot accounts right from the dev portal.
• Webhooks -  We supercharged our webhooks engine in this release. First, roomId is no longer a required filter so you can now create a single webhook that delivers messages for all of your rooms. This was a long requested feature so we’re really excited to get it out there. We also added several new resource and event types; including the ability to be notified when people join or leave a room. Check out the Webhooks Explained a complete listing of new features.
• Teams API -  Teams is a new feature that was rolled out to all Spark apps last month; giving users a better way to organize related rooms and form ad-hoc communities to get work done. The new Teams API make it possible to automate the formation of teams and manage the rooms within them.
• Message Formatting -  This one is my favorite. The Messages API now supports a limited set of markdown formatting. Bot and Integrations can send rich text including bold, italic, link, bulleted lists, and fenced code blocks! Check out the Formatting Messages guide to try it out. Make sure you’re logged in to the dev portal to run the samples.

We’ll post a new blog this week and next week that goes into more detail on these APIs and features.  So be sure to stop by the World of Solutions, DevNet Zone and the Collaboration Partner Village to see everything in action.  And be sure to check out Collaboration Reimagined on Thursday, July 14th at 9:00AM PDT at the Innovation Theater.