Microsoft Graph @ Ignite 2021
Welcome to Ignite 2021
As we evolve and grow within the hybrid work landscape, the needs of customers and organizations are constantly transforming. These changes require Microsoft 365 applications and data to deliver more value to meet organizations specific business goals and end user requirements. Today, we are excited to share new capabilities added to Microsoft Graph that give developers and IT administrators just that – more collaboration, more integration, more security, and more data for organizational insights. The Microsoft Graph team is committed to helping you meet the changing needs of hybrid work.
Microsoft Teams
Today, we’re pleased to announce the addition of new features to the Microsoft Teams endpoint, designed to make apps more comprehensive, collaborative, and secure for over 250 million monthly active users of Teams (as of Microsoft’s earnings call in July 2021).
You can now add Teams channel members in bulk in one single request. You can also view a preview of Teams chats in your apps. Further, we understand that effective cross-organization collaboration requires users outside of a team to view channel content. We have listened to customers and are announcing the Shared Channel API so you can extend an individual team’s collaboration throughout an organization.
Finally, we recently announced the general availability of the Export API, allowing enterprises and partners to export Teams message data for processing in Security and Compliance SaaS applications. Check out the blog on this release to learn more.
Cloud communications
We are constantly adding capabilities that allow customers to increase flexibility in integrating Teams and Outlook with the ecosystem of cloud communication software and custom-built communication apps.
First, we have added flexibility in the communications API when creating online meetings so developers can expressly allow chat, hard mute, Teams reactions, and automatic record functionality at the scheduling moment.
Second, developers can now access meeting attendance reports to identify who has attended or participated in meetings. This capability has been highly requested by our customers so that they can analyze productivity and well-being metrics for their employees.
Microsoft Graph Data Connect
Microsoft Graph Data Connect is a secure, high-throughput connector designed to copy select Microsoft 365 datasets into your Azure tenant. It’s an ideal tool for developers and data scientists seeking to combine Microsoft 365 productivity & communication data with enterprise data across systems of record & databases to get rich insights about your organization. We are seeing early interest from enterprises and partners to leverage their Microsoft data estate in employee productivity, fraud and compliance, and process efficiency analytics scenarios. Additionally, we are seeing interest in using Microsoft 365 data in bulk to train machine learning models or infuse into enterprise knowledge graphs.
This service initially offered customers access to their organization’s email, calendar, directory, and contacts. Organizations now have access to Teams chat dataset, both structured and unstructured fields, and will have access to SharePoint Online File Usage and Sharing by the end of 2021.
Microsoft Graph Data Connect is available in preview. Find out more information here, or check out this great overview video to start exploring how this service can change your understanding of your organization. Additionally, we’ve invested in solution accelerators to help customers setup their first Microsoft Graph Data Connect pipeline and envision the variety of applications of this data. Start coding today!
Microsoft Graph connectors and federated search
As one of the significant Microsoft 365 capabilities available to apps under Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Graph connectors enable users to search and view the content of third-party apps right alongside Microsoft’s own files and content. In addition to the dozens of ready-to-go Microsoft Graph connectors in our Microsoft Graph connectors gallery, we’re pleased to announce the preview of two new connectors.
The first is our ServiceNow Catalog Connector to enable users to search ServiceNow Service Catalog items. This connector represents Microsoft’s continued commitment to building native search capabilities that accelerate and enrich your customer service operations. Sign up today to participate in this preview.
The second is our Confluence Cloud Connector to enable searching for project wikis and documentation. This connector can empower your teams to collaborate more effectively on projects without switching context from an app with a Microsoft Search client. Sign up today to participate in this preview.
Check out the Microsoft Graph connectors blog for Ignite 2021 to learn more.
Additionally, we’re offering a developer preview of Microsoft Search Federation. This preview offers rich capabilities that enable developers to federate with other parts of the Microsoft Cloud or third-party data sources to render content as an answer or vertical on our Search canvases. New federation capabilities allow uses to retrieve content from their enterprise Dynamics 365 or Azure Cognitive Search and build and integrate their custom LOB search experiences into Microsoft Search. Sign up today to participate in this preview.
To Do tasks
Today, users get tasks from multiple sources, including Outlook emails, Teams chats, documents in OneDrive, and while browsing web content in Edge. To make it easier for users to manage this topography, Microsoft created To Do to be the single place for all users’ tasks from their work, but also personal life. The Microsoft Graph team is committed to supporting this vision by building APIs that allow streamlined integration with content in Microsoft To Do.
We are excited to announce the private preview of our new Task API, with the public preview release being targeted within this calendar year. The new endpoint me/tasks aligns with our vision of a single place for all tasks for a user. These APIs allow your apps to show, create, and organize users’ tasks and task lists. Please complete this form if you are interested in participating in the preview.
We’ve heard feedback from you around breaking down tasks into smaller subtasks. In response, we are introducing the new Checklist API so that you can now add, complete, and delete subtask for a task.
Finally, we have added capabilities to move a task across lists and show tasks that are relevant for a user such as tasks created today or important tasks due today.
Identity
Few things are as essential to hybrid work as identity and security, and we have several important announcements. Let’s start with Identity.
We’re excited to announce the general availability of custom questions in the access package request flow of Azure AD entitlement management. This feature allows you to configure custom questions in the access package policy. These questions are shown to requestors who can input their answers as part of the access request process. The answers are displayed to approvers, giving them helpful information to support better decision-making on the access request.
Additionally, we have rolled out new capabilities to give IT admins even more control over identity and access. Now, you can modify assignments to roles defined for entitlement management catalogs through Microsoft Graph. Further, you will be able to specify packages or groups that are incompatible with each other. Finally, IT admins will be able to notify users who don’t have Microsoft Authenticator set.
The Microsoft Graph team is committed to empowering your identity journey. We’ve created a set of recommended practices for developers and ISVs to build Zero Trust ready applications, including essential APIs and services. Read them today. We’d love questions and feedback from the community.
Security – Attack simulation training
Earlier this year, Microsoft 365 Defender released Attack simulation training so enterprises could run realistic attack scenarios within their organizations to simulate email phishing based social engineering attacks and identify vulnerable users before a real attack occurred. We received frequent requests to expose simulation and training data via API, and we have listened! Now, we are pleased to announce the availability of the Attack simulation training API – currently in beta – as part of Microsoft Graph.
This new API provides a unified interface and schema to integrate Attack simulation data with security solutions from Microsoft and ecosystem partners for more robust analytics, downstream reporting, or learning management scenarios.
Check out this recent blog article to learn more and get started!
Adaptive Cards
Earlier this year at Microsoft Build, we announced the availability of Universal Actions for Adaptive Cards in Teams cards sent by bots. We have listened to our customer feedback and we are happy to announce support for refreshed, up to date cards along with user specific views and sequential workflows. This means your cards sent via the message extension/link unfurling will always reflect the latest state of your content along with the other rich Universal Actions capabilities. What’s more, when sharing such a card to a chat or channel, you will be able to install the app in the group right while sending, opening the doors for a richer set of collaborative scenarios!
Developer tools and learning resources
We want developers and IT Professionals to love working with Microsoft Graph. We have rich tooling and learning resources to explore, and we are always adding more.
The Microsoft Graph website is the best place to start learning how Microsoft Graph can be valuable to your enterprise, but the Microsoft Graph Explorer is the best place to dive in and start learning how to write queries for Microsoft Graph. Additionally, the Microsoft Graph Toolkit & Microsoft Graph CLI tools are helpful resources to understand the power of Microsoft Graph and learn how to develop with Microsoft Graph. For our existing Microsoft Graph developers, we continue to enhance our Microsoft Graph SDKs, with significant performance improvements in .NET and broader platform support for our JavaScript SDK.
You’ll also find great Microsoft Graph learning tutorials and modules on Microsoft Learn. We have five full learning paths to check out, including Microsoft Graph Fundamentals to get started and a course on Microsoft Graph scenarios for JavaScript development. And if you are a more audio and visual type of learner, head over to the Microsoft 365 Developer YouTube channel. Start sharpening your skills and accelerating your integrations today.
…and finally, thank you!
Thanks for reading our blog, and for joining us at Ignite 2021. We’re always happy to get feedback from the community so please don’t hesitate to reach out to us, join one of our community calls, or suggest a new feature or enhancement. If you are a ISV Partner and would like to be part of our monthly NDA briefings, please fill out this form to join the Graph Technology Adoption Program. We look forward to seeing the great apps that you build.
Happy coding – the Microsoft Graph team.
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