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Quick summary:
Compares three approaches for integrating Microsoft Teams meeting recording and transcription into SaaS applications: Microsoft Graph API, custom meeting bots, and unified APIs.
What you’ll learn:
- How Microsoft Graph API’s authentication complexity and recording limitations create months of development overhead
- Why unified APIs handle cross-platform meeting bots, transcription, and calendar sync with weeks instead of months of development time
Who it’s for: Platform builders who want to to build meeting intelligence features without sacrificing engineering resources or time-to-market.
Let’s say you’re building a SaaS application that captures customer data. Like a CRM, or an ATS, or an EHR system. Would you be surprised if a customer told you that they would switch to a competitor if you couldn’t offer them a feature that automatically captures and processes meeting data?
We were always curious to know just how urgent meeting features are for SaaS users, and we learned that the urgency is up there. Turns out 94% of SaaS users would consider switching if competitors offered better meeting recording features, with 68% willing to make that switch within six months.
Microsoft Teams sits at the center of many Fortune 100 companies’ tech stacks, making an integration to record Teams meetings a worthwhile business priority for any product building meeting features.
We’ve built integrations for Teams before, so we know that’s not straightforward. Keep reading for a comparison of integration pathways you can take for your product (and what you should avoid).
What does a Teams integration look like?
Though Teams does have meeting AI offered through Copilot, it’s missing a big component that SaaS companies can provide: A bridge for meeting data to reach a company’s tech stack and become something more than just data.
With a Teams integration, you could automatically capture sales call transcriptions to a CRM and sync insights to deal records. Or you could help hiring teams create searchable interview archives to speed up high-volume hiring cycles.
But building an integration to handle this at scale requires a few things that also eat into your roadmap:
- A simple authentication flow for users
- Programmatic retrieval of data for scheduled meetings, and a direct calendar integration
- Reliable access to meeting recordings and transcription data
- Compliance with organizational policies
With 85% of SaaS users expect meeting capabilities built directly into their existing workflows, you need a reliable Teams integration that also feels native to your product rather than an add-on. Depending on the integration route you take, there will be trade-offs that determine when you go to market and what you go to market with.
| Approach | Development complexity | Ongoing maintenance |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Graph API | High (Complex OAuth setup, tenant permission requirements, manual recording triggers) | High (OAuth complexity, API updates, cross-tenant permission issues) |
| Microsoft’s Bot Framework + Real-time Media Platform | Very High (C# and .NET Framework requirement, Windows server deployment, Real-time Media Platform setup) | Very High (OAuth complexity, UI changes, API updates, Windows infrastructure maintenance) |
| Nylas Notetaker API | Low (Single API integration, handles authentication and infrastructure) | Low (Nylas handles platform maintenance and updates) |
Understanding each approach to integrating Microsoft Teams meetings
Let’s briefly walk through what each implementation path would involve.
Microsoft Teams Graph API
What you get with this integration:
- Post-meeting access to transcripts and recordings
- Meeting creation and management capabilities
- Access to meeting metadata and participant information
Where developers run into challenges:
- Complex OAuth 2.0 setup with Microsoft Entra ID registration
- Cannot programmatically start recordings – users must manually click “Record” every time
- Only the meeting organizer or users explicitly granted access can retrieve recordings. Even with proper OAuth scopes, you’ll receive 403 errors if the recording wasn’t shared with your application’s designated user account.
- For multi-customer SaaS applications, you would need separate authorization for each customer’s tenant.
- Transcript quality depends on meeting audio quality, while post-processing needs to be handled separately.
What building this integration could look like: