Build 2019: Microsoft Graph powers the Microsoft 365 platform

Microsoft Graph team

Welcome

Microsoft Graph is a big topic at this year’s event. Both Satya Nadella and Rajesh Jha took time in their keynotes to focus on the impact of Microsoft Graph: how it powers intelligent, people-centric experiences delivered in Microsoft products and in our partners’ own applications and services. These messages are a gratifying reflection of the hard work and focus of the entire Microsoft Graph community, and we thank you.

Microsoft Graph data connect is generally available

Today we announced that Microsoft Graph data connect is now generally available! We created Microsoft Graph data connect to help enterprises and ISVs build a new class of insight-powered applications, using at-scale datasets.

Historically, building applications using at-scale datasets has presented two real challenges. For developers, the challenge is that it’s a non-trivial programming and infrastructure effort to manage at-scale data using traditional APIs. For customers, it’s that the security and privacy of their at-scale data is essential.  Microsoft Graph data connect offers a set of services to help address these challenges, including:

  • Scalable data access: A secure pipeline between an organization’s Office 365 tenant and Azure Data Factory delivers Office 365 data from the entirety of your organization to your application, on a repeatable schedule, with just a few simple steps.
  • Granular consent: Application developers must specify exactly what types of data an application can access, while administrators can filter content and must give explicit approval to access Office 365 data before access is granted.
  • Data governance: Developers creating applications that take advantage of Microsoft Graph data connect can specify a set of detailed policies with which they intend to comply.  Office 365 administrators can then review and consent to these policies.
  • Discrete Azure services: Applications connect to a copy of the specifically requested Office 365 dataset located within a separately provisioned, customer owned and controlled Azure instance – never directly to the data sources powering their apps.

We’re licensing Microsoft Graph data connect through Workplace Analytics. To find out how to get started, contact us. To get inspired about solutions, watch the Talentsoft + Dior video and to learn more about building so Microsoft Graph data connect, check out the technical documentation. .

Preview the Microsoft Graph toolkit

We also announced the public preview of the Microsoft Graph toolkit. Now it takes just a few lines of code to add Microsoft Graph-powered web components like files, tasks, and calendar items into an app. The toolkit is supported in React, Angular, and other JavaScript frameworks. We’re sharing a preview version the Microsoft Graph toolkit on GitHub. Check out the repository and try the samples we’ve built – or create your own samples and share them with our dev community.

Looking forward to Microsoft Graph connectors

Microsoft Graph APIs offer your applications and services access to Microsoft 365 data and capabilities. Microsoft Graph connectors work the other way around. Connectors offer your data and capabilities access to our Microsoft 365 applications and services. The canonical example we envision powering is Microsoft Search. Partner data that is connected to and indexed in Microsoft Graph becomes searchable alongside data from Microsoft products and services.

We are working with industry-leading partners including ServiceNow to illustrate how connectors will enhance the relevance and context of our partners’ data by joining it with Microsoft Graph. Bringing ServiceNow data into experiences like Microsoft Search, people cards, and productivity tools like Microsoft Word is a really compelling way to keep people focused and in the flow of their work. We’re excited to continue working with ServiceNow in the coming months to deliver on the full potential of this technology.

Today Microsoft Graph connectors are in an invite-only private preview. We anticipate expanding the scope of the private preview as we approach Ignite 2019. We’ll continue to provide updates on connectors to the Microsoft 365 developer community through this blog and at graph.microsoft.com.

Improving the Microsoft Graph developer experience

In the past year, we’ve focused on initiatives that were suggested by the community to improve the developer experience. We’ve established a monthly cadence of community calls and a dedicated Microsoft Graph instance of UserVoice.

We’ve also revamped our documentation to make it more appealing, easier to navigate, and useful. Our reference content now includes code snippets from our SDKs to help you complete your projects just a little more quickly. Check out this example that creates a User on the Microsoft Graph. For those that were holding back from using the SDKs because we didn’t support beta APIs, we now support these in .NET, JavaScript and PHP. We’ve made it even easier to use Microsoft Authentication Libraries (MSAL) with Microsoft Graph. Today announcing a preview of the authentication providers to simplify token acquisition for your application.

We’ll continue to drive a better developer experience – don’t hesitate to reach out to us on our UserVoice to make a request.

New generally available datasets and resources

We’re making several Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) datasets and resources generally available at Build. For example, Azure AD audit logs are now generally available on Microsoft Graph. You can now get tenant user activities and sign-ins to analyze how users are accessing and using Azure AD services.

We’re also pleased to announce that the secureScore resource type is now generally available. Secure Score helps you understand your tenant’s security position, per day, relative to other tenants and organizations. Explore our documentation to learn more about the properties that are available to developers.

It’s common practice for users to browse across Outlook calendars to view the availability of co-workers, rooms, or equipment. Given the usefulness of this capability, we’re particularly happy to say that the capability to get the free/busy schedule of users and resources is now generally available.

New preview datasets and resources

For the first time, Microsoft Graph is expanding beyond the boundaries of Microsoft 365 to include preview access to datasets from Dynamics 365 Business Central. Now, you can add customer, vendor, and financial information to your Microsoft Graph-powered applications, opening an entirely new set of possibilities for workflows, analysis, and insights.

Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is previewing a number of new resource types. The new riskyUser resource type assigns a risk level to users by analyzing login events and calculating the probability that a user is compromised, to help you better understand threats to your network security. The applicationSignInSummary resource type, which allows you to track the number of successful or failed sign in attempts to an application, is also now in preview. A new trustFrameworkPolicy resource type enables a number of methods to get, list, create, update or delete a Trust Framework. And finally, we’re also previewing a number of methods to interact with access review-related resources on Microsoft Graph, to review and certify guest or employee access to applications and/or group memberships.

We’ve added new resource types to the Microsoft Graph Security endpoint. The tiIndicators resource type allows you to upload your threat indicators to Microsoft security tools and take actions including allow, block, or alert, and the securityActions resource type helps you see, invoke, or cancel actions when a threat indicator is identified.

Although Outlook does not save messages in MIME format, you can now preview the ability to GET the MIME content of messages and item attachments. And if you’re working on integrations for Microsoft Teams, you’ll now find preview functionality for Shifts management. The shift resource type defines a number of methods and properties for defining and managing shifts for users. We’ve also added preview functionality for getting 1:1 chats. Check out our documentation on the chat resource type, including methods, properties, and relationships.

Wrap-up

Thanks for taking the time to read the blog – the big news and the details. If you joined us for Build, welcome and enjoy your time with us. If you only read this blog – check back with us over the next few days, as we’ll post recordings of the Microsoft Graph sessions. To receive regular updates on Microsoft Graph news, subscribe to our RSS feed.

 

Happy coding,

The Microsoft Graph team

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