September 24th, 2018

Microsoft Graph @ Ignite 2018

For the last several months, Microsoft Graph engineering teams in Redmond and around the world have worked to prepare for Ignite 2018.  That moment has finally arrived.  We have 58 sessions across Ignite 2018 that highlight the ways in which the Microsoft Graph is changing our products and ecosystem. We’re pleased to provide an overview of the all work we’ve done to create a richer, deeper, more powerful tool for our developer communities and the customers they serve.

What’s New

Managed access to Microsoft Graph

We’ve traditionally focused on making the Microsoft Graph API a real-time  access point for people and organization-centric applications. Today, our customers build amazing, feature-rich applications using Microsoft Graph APIs. But as they work with larger amounts of sensitive data to create next-generation insight applications, developers face new challenges. ​ For example: data access at scale requires expensive engineering. Data privacy controls are often limited. Data governance is reinvented by each new application, with no common patterns that developers can utilize, and customers can trust. ​

With Microsoft Graph data connect, we’ve taken steps to transform these unique challenges into opportunity. Data is moved securely and in bulk to a customer’s own Azure subscription. Granular consent models are integrated directly into the Office 365 admin portal. Integrated policy monitoring ensures that data you use adheres to certain policies pre-defined by customer admins.

We took the first steps toward Microsoft Graph Data Connect when we announced “Managed Access to Microsoft Graph Data” in Private Preview at Build 2018.  Now we’re pleased to announce that we’re moving into public preview, with a new name. We have posted documentation for developers  to get started right away.

Notifications

One of the most interesting and powerful new features in Microsoft Graph is notifications.  In today’s world, people work on multiple endpoints – devices, platforms, and operating systems – making it a significant challenge to keep users engaged in the tasks, workflows, or processes that an application delivers.  The notifications API, now available in preview, helps developers address this challenge. Using a Microsoft identity combined with the power of Microsoft Graph, the notifications API enables you to deliver, distribute, and retrieve notifications to users across devices  , enhancing the consistency and convenience of users’ experiences with your app.

We have a couple of resources lined up for you to try out notifications.  First, we’re making the new notifications API preview available in the Graph Explorer.  You can dive a little deeper into the API using the Project Rome SDK preview , where you’ll find docs, samples, and quick start guidance.

Dynamics is now in Microsoft Graph

For the first time, Microsoft Dynamics datasets will appear on the Microsoft Graph endpoint. Using the financial datasets in beta, you can start building connected apps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The new financial datasets cover the primary entities in the application and enable you to create customized apps and functionality for customers.

Tools for IT pros & admins

If you thought that the power of Microsoft Graph was only accessible to developers, check out PowerApps. With PowerApps we’ve created tools that admins and IT professionals can use to create powerful tools for their organizations. To get started there’s a training app for new users, ten samples for common scenarios , and drag-and-drop Office templates  built directly into PowerApps designer – all powered behind the scenes by Microsoft Graph.

Security & Identity

We’re pleased to let the developer community know that the security API alerts dataset, announced at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, is now generally available.  The security API helps enterprises streamline security operations and improve cyber defenses. With this API, you can easily access and update security alerts from an expanded set of Microsoft and third-party security products. Responses are aggregated from all products and delivered in a unified schema for easier integration with existing security tools and workflows, offering users deep insights that may inform threat protection and response.

In addition to making alerts generally available, we’re adding secure scores to the Microsoft Graph beta endpoint for developers to preview.  Secure score  is a daily score that indicates how closely an organization is adhering to cloud security practices recommended by Microsoft.

Identity is central to Microsoft Graph-powered applications and Azure Active Directory (AAD) is the engine behind identity.   We’re making new AAD resources and capabilities generally available, including  change notifications for users (webhooks), organization contacts and missing user properties.  We’re also adding additional datasets that help developers see contacts for otherMails and emailAddresses.  Broadly, you can now build cleaner flows for B2C local accounts and make queries more accessible with transitive down group membership.

We’re also adding new APIs to the Microsoft Graph beta endpoint. The risky users API provides a powerful, programmatic way to access the aggregated risk/probability (High/Medium/Low) that a user’s Azure AD identity is compromised and updated the sign-in API.  Finally, we’ve just launched a new access review API that lets enterprises to programmatically query and create reviews of access rights.

Intune

Over the past eighteen months we’ve added a lot of Intune resources to Microsoft Graph. Much of what we’re now adding to both the beta and production endpoints is incremental – so if you’re using our Intune APIs, we encourage you to do regular, programmatic reviews of our Microsoft Graph changelog to stay current with what’s moving into production.

Microsoft Teams, Messages, Calendars, Files, and Folders

Microsoft Teams has emerged as one of the most rapidly growing extensibility surfaces in Office 365. Increasing its connectivity to Microsoft Graph is a priority, and for Ignite we’re adding new Microsoft Teams resources. A new tab creation API lets applications install Microsoft Teams apps on a tab. A new calls and online meetings API enables you to build bots that can answer and route phone calls. We’re also adding a new set of applications permissions that allow apps to take certain actions without human intervention.  We’ll announce GA dates for these features soon. In the meantime, start building apps  that automate your Microsoft Teams lifecycles, and stay tuned for more announcements.

SharePoint developers will see that we’re starting to address the gap between Microsoft Graph and the familiar REST APIs used today, with the addition of new SharePoint functionality in beta.  One of the key things we’re adding is a pages API. Functionality here is still somewhat limited, but this API enables you to create and delete pages, as well as set some (but not all) of a page’s properties.

A few weeks after Ignite 2018, you can look for a new SharePoint list views API – and new documentation – on the Microsoft Graph beta endpoint.  This API will give you the ability to enumerate list views, create new views for a list, and add new columns – including a new location column type – to list views.

The SharePoint team is interested in feedback from the developer community on these features.  Let us know about any gaps or feature requests on User Voice or reach out to us on the OneDrive GitHub repository with additional information, contributions or requests for code samples.

We’re also expanding some existing capabilities. Now on the drives API, you can manage the “followed content” property for documents created by specific users that are shared in SharePoint or OneDrive. And if you’re using our copy & move API, note that we’re expanding its functionality to allow bulk move and copy of files on a site.

Outlook continues to innovate and bring more capabilities to Microsoft Graph. We’ve added new message-related features to the beta endpoint.  For example, you can now add custom message headers to new messages.  Also, the get MailTips API, which enables you to fetch information about email recipients (for example, Out of Office information) before sending a mail, is now generally available.  Calendar capabilities are also extended on the beta endpoint, where it’s now possible to get free/busy data for users.

Tools & capabilities for developers

OpenAPI 3.0 (formerly Swagger) is a standards-based specification for describing web services to enhance interoperability.  At Build 2018, we announced on our blog that by July we’d have open API 3.0 capabilities for Microsoft Graph, and since then we’ve had a preview of that description on GitHub.  For Ignite we’re making information, descriptions, security scopes and more available for our production (v1.0) endpoint generally available.  We’re also refreshing the GitHub content for beta endpoints, but note that our beta content won’t have the same level of detail.   We encourage you to try the Open API 3.0 description available in GitHub and provide us with feedback on any issues.

SDKs are essential tools for developers and we’re hard at work updating and expanding the set of SDKs available for Microsoft Graph developers. You’ll find updates to the beta JavaScript (TypeScript types & core library update) and PHP SDKs.  We also have an Objective-C SDK core library available for preview.  Our Java SDK is now out of preview and our JavaScript and .NET SDKs are updated.  Explore our full set of code samples and SDKs today!

Wrapping things up

We love to hear stories about how developers and customers are using Microsoft Graph, and your feedback is always appreciated.  We encourage you to join our community of passionate Microsoft Graph developers a number of ways: join our Developer Program, attend our monthly Community Calls, Connect with us on Twitter by posting with #MicrosoftGraph, and send us your questions on Stack Overflow, tagged MicrosoftGraph.

 

Happy coding!

The Microsoft Graph team