Better Together: SharePoint and Microsoft Graph API Beta now available!

SharePoint is home to many of the critical documents, items, and sites for organizations of all sizes. Our growing Microsoft Graph API set is designed to make working with your data, hosted across Microsoft products, as easy as possible. In this light, it’s natural that combining these two capabilities together would, we think, create something amazing.

We’re working to do just that, and are pleased to announce the Beta of SharePoint Sites and Lists APIs in Microsoft Graph. This is Beta is an early preview, and not all functionality may be present yet, but a number of new scenarios are accessible in Microsoft Graph. With these new APIs, developers can work with the set of SharePoint sites that are relevant to users and organizations. They can access and update list items that provide metadata for documents. They can connect to respective Drives for these libraries as well, providing a path towards accessing any document in an organization. These Microsoft Graph APIs make all of the important data in SharePoint available in a more flexible and streamlined manner to developers.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then Microsoft Graph may require no introduction, but it’s worthwhile to emphasize the many benefits of Microsoft Graph:

• Consistent and unified. Microsoft Graph provides a consistent and interlinked API for working with a wide variety of types of data across Microsoft services. Developers can traverse their organizational hierarchy, discover tasks and groups associated with those users, and use organizational insights to find active working relationships between teams.
• Available on devices and services. Microsoft Graph has a growing set of SDKs for devices and for services – so whether you’re working on Android apps, creating a .net Azure web site, or building a Ruby service, you can quickly incorporate Graph data into your application.
• Growing support for Hybrid and On-Premises. Increasingly, Microsoft Graph will offer support hybrid deployments, meaning that organizations can flexibly expose on-premises and cloud services behind one consistent endpoint. 

The consistent, unified APIs and SDKs of Microsoft Graph now come to SharePoint sites and lists. You can get started with SharePoint sites and list APIs by reading the documentation, available at https://developer.microsoft.com/graph/docs/api-reference/beta/resources/sharepoint. We always value your feedback, but we’re especially eager to see it while we finish SharePoint sites and list APIs. Please reach out via the SharePoint UserVoice with your suggestions, and if you have questions and feedback, please use the SharePoint Technical Community or the [MicrosoftGraph] tag on Stack Overflow.

SharePoint has many other API endpoints beyond Microsoft Graph, ranging from on-server .net APIs to REST endpoints to a service-based .net and JavaScript client object model (known as CSOM). These APIs cover a very large area, including scenarios as diverse as managing the provisioning of SharePoint sites, administering the configuration of machines in a farm, or changing the metadata for a page. The CSOM and REST APIs will continue to be fully supported for the wide array of scenarios they cover.

We expect that for lists and sites, the combination of Microsoft Graph and SharePoint will make it even easier to build a wide array of applications and services that leverage data at the core of SharePoint. We look forward to seeing what gets built using these APIs.  Happy coding!