Getting Started with Microsoft Graph and Office 365 Groups

Key Takeaways

hello everyone thank you for joining us today on a video around Microsoft graph and today we have here Mike McLean thank you for joining us Mike thanks so much for having me you know I'm really excited to be here and speak with you about office 365 groups great so how about you start by sharing some context about groups and groups in relationship to our collaboration platform great well office 365 groups truly power all of the teamwork experiences that we see today across Microsoft 365 we really look at office 365 groups as the foundational and membership service that ties together a lot of these collaboration experiences that we've enabled in our apps and services great how about the opportunity for developers and what are some of the core capabilities that we offer through the group's API well there are a lot of different places across the suite where users create office 365 groups today every time you create a new team and Microsoft teams or you create a new SharePoint team site or you create a group in Outlook or Yammer you're actually creating an office 365 group under the covers these experiences are great but we know that there are a lot of different ways that customers need to extend our group creation processes to meet the diverse needs of their business that's why Microsoft graph is a perfect place to expose all of these entities and really provide access to a unified API with which our customers and partners can build their solutions so what are some of those scenarios that our partners are building well when you look at the content that we've published today in our conceptual documentation on Docs at Microsoft comm we highlight the fact that we provision office 365 groups with a connected set of resources so every time you create an office 365 group you have a SharePoint team site you have a calendar a mailbox where you can where you can perform conversations and a whole host of other assets in addition to that through Microsoft graph we've exposed a lot of different actions such as the ability to create and provision the group the ability to modify membership the ability to renew a group and even delete an office 365 group when you go a little bit deeper into the actual API that we've built not only do we expose the ability to perform various and management functions but we also expose the ability to access the content that's related to that group as well so you can really dive in and retrieve things like the calendar events that are scheduled for this group the conversations that have been sent and and like I said modifying membership great so how about we see it in action and you show us a demo of the capabilities of the API yeah let's take a look so here in graph explorer I am logged in as a user in my office 365 tenant and here what I'm going to do is just perform a quick query against a group that I have in Azure Active Directory when I'm working with my office 365 groups they're all stored here in Azure Active Directory and it's very easy to come in and identify the ID for a particular group when I have that ID I can execute a query and then you can take a look here at some of the properties we retrieve so for this particular group I have the date and time the group was created I have a description of the group the display name and I even have the group type which indicates this is an office 365 group in addition to some of the basic properties I also inform that this is a highly confidential group so we retrieve data related to the classification of that group then we have some more information related to how to access that group through email terms of the email addresses that are provisioned with this group so this classification is something that you can also set through the API right yes yes the classification you can set through the API and you can also update things like membership and and the owners so for example if I wanted to go a little deeper into the group I could retrieve the entire membership list here so here you can see Alex is a member of this group we have his email address is UPN and a whole host of other info now to go one level deeper I could even look at the specific list of owners so I can see here I have a much smaller set of users like Patty is an owner in this group and so this allows me to perform you know certain functions on this group that might tailor to the needs of my business okay sounds good do you have any other demo or some scenarios than you would like to share with us today yeah so a real common scenario is that a a customer might need to adapt that group creation flow to their business and when the user needs an office 365 group the company might want to request some additional information for example who is a second owner or what is the justification around why they need this office 365 group so today we have a demo where we've actually used the Microsoft graph API we've hooked it up to a SharePoint task list to capture that information and then we can kick off a group provisioning using Microsoft flow so here I have a SharePoint task list that captures all that information and so I've submitted a request for an office 365 group and what it's done is it's sent an email to my manager and to actually ask for this office 365 group so my manager can approve this group creation request right here in their email and what's happening now is we're actually executing a post request to provision this office 365 group and so we have the information that we've retrieved from that SharePoint task list coming down a little bit further what we're going to be doing is then populating that classification that you just mentioned that's retrieved from the SharePoint task list and then we're going to come through perform a couple of more updates on the membership of that group to make sure we have the owners and the members correct and then down here the very last thing we're gonna do is not only create this group for Outlook but we're gonna enable it for Microsoft teams in one step using a Microsoft graph API so this is a great example of using the API inducing core functionality in our products because you're starting from a SharePoint list you're using flow flow is then sending an email in Outlook with actionable messages which you can also use if you're just too in development using the mail API and then time that all up across groups and tea and assigning owners the classification and with very simple code right right because a lot of these processes normally it would be one two or multiple steps to actually create this group and enable for for multiple experiences so let's take a look at our flow and see how it's it's progressing so out here if I scroll down we'll see this is the flow that we were just executing for this group creation process and when I drill in you'll see that our condition was met where our manager approved the creation of that group and then here is that post request that we were talking about that happened and we called out to our add a function we provision that that office 365 group so now that group is created so if I come back to Outlook as a user and i refresh my Outlook experience here if I scroll down underneath more I scroll to the very bottom you'll see here's my new product launch group so just like that I have my group here in Outlook add my welcome email and it's ready to go the very last thing that we'll take a look at here and Microsoft teams is that when we provision that group in Outlook we called out to the team's API through Microsoft graph and we enabled that group for Microsoft teams as well so now I have submitted that request for my group my managers approved it use a national message and now we have that in Outlook as well as Microsoft teams I can get going well thank you Mike for joining us today and for that great demo and everyone remember if you want to get information about how to use the group's API and more visit us at graph the Microsoft comm thank you and happy coding