Microsoft Graph is the developer’s API for Microsoft cloud and its resources. Graph serves as a gateway to connect to the services, data, and intelligence offered by the company. Microsoft Graph allows developers to build their custom applications using a unified programmability model to take advantage of Office 365, Windows 10, enterprise mobility, and security.
Microsoft Graph API can give an enterprise direct access to all its data stored in the Microsoft cloud. Graph has been growing in terms of its use as it justifies the tag given by Microsoft — “The fabric for all your data.” Graph also allows its users to make the most of the data stored in the Microsoft cloud by the means of workflows, machine learning, data sources, third-party applications, and business intelligence tools. The graph API is powerful and flexible to extend from emails and spreadsheets to provide companies with better collaboration, planning, and management and security services.
More about Microsoft Graph
Microsoft Graph provides the client libraries and the REST APIs to access data from various Microsoft products and applications. Here are some of them:
- OneDrive
- Outlook/Exchange
- Microsoft Teams
- Planner
- Excel
- OneNote
- Azure Directory Services
- Windows 10 services
How does Microsoft Graph work?
Microsoft Graph serves as a connecting medium across all these platforms using relationships. At the core, Graph works using the concepts of users and groups.
A user in the context of Microsoft Graph is one among the millions of users who use Microsoft cloud services. Every user acts as a primary focal point, whose data privacy, identity, and access are well-managed by Microsoft services. User data is what fuels the business of Microsoft. Microsoft Graph enriches user data in the Microsoft cloud in terms of real-time updates, better accessibility, deep insights, and richer contexts. All this is done keeping in mind the permissions of the users and their access.
A group, on the other hand, is a fundamental entity in the Microsoft Graph, which lets the users collaborate and integrate with other services. Group serves as the core behind the collaboration, teamwork, and service integrations in Office 365. Enterprises are greatly benefited by these richer scenarios in planning tasks, group works, and various other activities such as education, marketing, and more.
Applications
Microsoft Graph can help enterprises and individual users build better experiences in their everyday activities. Using Microsoft Graph, accessing the data is much simpler and straightforward. Developers can easily start implementing and using the functionalities of Microsoft Graph using web services and APIs.
Microsoft Graph comes with a very wide scope of possibilities and can be used in various domains of businesses. Here are a few of the possible use cases of implementing Microsoft Graph:
- Hiring employees will be made easy using Active Directory.
- Getting the rich context for the existing applications.
- Meeting planning.
- Can serve as a personal assistant to sort personal and professional schedules.
- Can be used in sales and marketing.
- Can demonstrate real-time data charts for better visualization.
- Integrating work with Microsoft Office tools.
- Managing personal and professional calendars.
- Resource consumption and usage pattern analysis.
There are several other applications and benefits that can leverage the power of Microsoft Graph.
Microsoft Graph Data Connect allows its users to interact with data in a newer way, which is made possible using the Microsoft Graph APIs. Graph Data Connect provides features to access the scope, pattern, user and admin permissions of the data entities. It also provides an easy means to perform data operations, which provides protection and better access management to the data.
Developers can use Graph Explorer to check out all the possible scenarios and requests that can be made using Microsoft Graph. Developers can fetch various aspects such as user and group profiles, files, photos, emails classified as per their priorities, managers list, notes, trends, and many more using simple REST API requests.
How do you use Microsoft Graph? Let us know in the comments section.
