30DaysMSGraph – Day 2 – Overview Microsoft Graph

Brian T. Jackett

November 2nd, 2018 0

List of all posts in the #30DaysMSGraph series

In Day 1 we discussed why it is important to learn to use Microsoft Graph. Today we’ll cover what is Microsoft Graph.

Services in Microsoft Graph

What started as an Office specific set of APIs (read here for more on the history) has now expanded into Microsoft Graph which covers APIs across multiple services including Office 365, Azure AD, Enterprise Mobility and Security, Windows 10, and Education. While many of these services have had their own individual REST endpoints in the past, any development integrating more than one service involved several barriers including:

Discovering the endpoint URL
Authenticating to each endpoint separately
Managing different permission models
Incompatible data formats
…and more

With the introduction of Microsoft Graph you can call disparate APIs with a unified schema, authenticate to multiple services using a single access token, and manage OAuth permissions to multiple services with a common permission model.

Speaking of all these services, the following list shows the services accessible from Microsoft Graph (as of publish date Nov 2018):

Azure Active Directory
Office 365 services
- SharePoint
- OneDrive
- Outlook/Exchange
- Microsoft Teams
- OneNote
- Planner
- Excel
Enterprise Mobility and Security services
- Identity Manager
- Intune
- Advanced Threat Analytics
- Advanced Threat Protection
Windows 10 services
- Activities
- Devices
Education

Endpoint versions

We will go into these services in more detail in later posts but know that Microsoft Graph has versioned APIs. As of the time of publishing (November 2018) the currently available versions include:

1.0
beta

As you can see Microsoft Graph now includes many of the services across the entire Microsoft 365 suite and more are being added over time.

Try It Out

Familiarize yourself with Microsoft Graph resources including Microsoft Graph documentation and Microsoft Graph blog. If you’ve found additional useful resources, please share them in the comments below.

Day 2 repo link