Now Releasing – Enhanced preview support for Microsoft Graph API calls from SharePoint Framework

With SharePoint Framework, you can build client-side web parts and extensions across Team and Communication Sites. Microsoft Graph provides API access to an ever-widening set of services across Microsoft, and Azure Active Directory lets you secure additional custom enterprise web services. With recent updates, you can bring these capabilities together, making it possible to build solutions that pull together workloads like calendars, tasks, and group information in one location – your SharePoint sites. This capability has been available in preview since September and based on your feedback, we’re expanding the scenarios and scopes you can use within your SharePoint Framework based projects.

Updates to support these new capabilities are being rolled out across Office 365. In earlier previews, a more limited set of Microsoft Graph permissions was available. Now, tenant administrators have new tools to authorize and grant additional permissions for a script running within sites, which includes SharePoint Framework (SPFx). Via PowerShell and new portal tools, tenant administrators can discover and manage permissions that script has for Microsoft Graph and for enterprise applications. In addition, developers can add a suggested set of permissions into their application packages so that administrators can approve specific permissions as they add new SPFx components. This new administration experience is now available to Targeted Release (First Release) tenancies, in preview.

Tenant Administrator user experience for management of permissions

To get started, a new version of SharePoint Framework script libraries (version 1.4.1) is also now available which features evolved APIs for accessing Microsoft Graph and 3rd party enterprise Azure Active Directory services: MSGraphClient and AadHttpClient, respectively. These APIs automate the process of authenticating and retrieving an API token that you can use to make subsequent web service calls. For developers, you can read more about the new APIs and application permission packaging capabilities.

With the extended preview for Microsoft Graph and Azure Active Directory-authenticated services, the full breadth of Graph capabilities is available for your solutions. It’s now much easier to build out SharePoint sites as the hub of collaboration across Office 365. We look forward to your feedback on this preview, via Github Issues, on github.com/sharepoint.

Update: SharePoint Framework v.1.4.1 also includes support for Node v8 (LTS) and npm v5. Please see the release notes for more information about this and other specific topics.