Microsoft Graph 

This is a continuation of a series of articles on Azure services from an operational engineering perspective with the most recent introduction of this topic with the link here. The previous article discussed the Microsoft Graph Data Connect used with Microsoft Graph. This article discusses the API. Microsoft Graph enables integration with the best of Microsoft 365, Windows 10 and Enterprise mobility and security services in Microsoft 365, using REST APIs and client libraries

Microsoft Graph provides a unified programmability model by consolidating multiple APIs into one. As Microsoft’s cloud services have evolved, the APIs to reference them has also changed. Originally, when cloud services like Exchange Online, Sharepoint, OneDrive and others evolved, the API to access those services was launched too. The list for SDKs and REST APIs for these services started growing for developers to access content. Each endpoint also required Access Tokens and returned status code that were unique to each individual service. Microsoft Graph brought a consistent simplified way to interact with these services.

The data virtualization platform that Microsoft Graph presents also supports querying relationships between:

·        Azure Active Directory

·        Exchange Online – including mail, calendar and contacts.

·        Sharepoint online including file storage

·        OneDrive

·        OneDrive for business

·        OneNote and

·        Planner

As a collaborative app development platform Microsoft Graph is not alone. Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Workspace are applications with collaboration as their essence and designed for flexibility of hybrid work. For example, Teams toolkit for Visual studio code lets us use existing web development framework to build cross platform Team applications against any backend. Microsoft Graph provides both the seamlessness and the data for realtime collaboration.

Connectors and Microsoft Data Connect round up the data transfer mechanisms. Connectors offer a simple and intuitive way to bring content from external services to Microsoft Graph which enables external data to power Microsoft 365 experiences. It does this with the help of REST APIs that are used to 1. Create and manage external data connections, 2. Define and register the schema of the external data type(s), 3. Ingest external data items into Microsoft Graph and 4. Sync external groups.  Microsoft Graph Data Connect augments Microsoft Graph’s transactional model with an intelligent way to access rich data at scale. It is ideal to connect big data and for machine learning. It uses Azure Data Factory to copy Microsoft 365 data to the application’s storage at configurable intervals. It provides a set of tools to streamline the delivery of this data into Microsoft Azure. It allows us to manage the data and see who is accessing it, and it requests specific properties of an entity. It enhances the Microsoft Graph model, which grants or denies applications access to entire entities.

 

Sample code for enriching user information:

        public static void AddUserGraphInfo(this ClaimsPrincipal claimsPrincipal, User user)

        {

            var identity = claimsPrincipal.Identity as ClaimsIdentity;

            identity.AddClaim(

                new Claim(GraphClaimTypes.DisplayName, user.DisplayName));

            identity.AddClaim(

                new Claim(GraphClaimTypes.Email,

                    claimsPrincipal.IsPersonalAccount()? user.UserPrincipalName : user.Mail));

            identity.AddClaim(

                new Claim(GraphClaimTypes.TimeZone,

                    user.MailboxSettings.TimeZone ?? "UTC"));

            identity.AddClaim(

                new Claim(GraphClaimTypes.TimeFormat, user.MailboxSettings.TimeFormat ?? "h:mm tt"));

            identity.AddClaim(

                new Claim(GraphClaimTypes.DateFormat, user.MailboxSettings.DateFormat ?? "M/d/yyyy"));

        }

 

   Sample delta query for mail folders

   Public async Task<IMailFolderDeltaCollectionPage> GetIncrementalChangeInMailFolders()

{

           IMailFolderDeltaCollectionPage deltaCollection;

              deltaCollection = await _graphClient.Me.MailFolders

                .Delta()

                .Request()

                .GetAsync();

return deltaCollection;

}