Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Graph, 17 May 2022

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From YouTube: Integrate Microsoft Graph connector content on Office.com

Description

In this 14-minute developer focused demo – Mounika Narayanan shows how easy it is to bring external data into Microsoft Search via Graph connectors. Once data is known, it can be found tenant-wide by Office.com, Teams, SharePoint, Bing at Work, etc. using Microsoft Search, Context IQ, and Search at Workplace. Link and content details are typically rendered in sharable Adaptive Cards. In this session, review Graph connector anatomy and core code to create connection, schema, externalItem, and add activities, for building your custom connector. This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on May 17, 2022.

Demo Presenter
• Mounika Narayanan (Microsoft)

Supporting materials
• Documentation - Microsoft Graph connectors overview for Microsoft Search | aka.ms/graphconnectors
• Documentation - Microsoft Graph connectors overview | aka.ms/graphconnectorsapi
• Gallery - Microsoft Graph connectors | aka.ms/graphconnectorsgallery
• Article - Microsoft Editor is now superpowered using Context IQ to help you stay in the flow of your work | https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/microsoft-editor-is-now-superpowered-using-context-iq-to-help/ba-p/2897180

Learn more
• Microsoft 365 Unified Sample gallery - https://aka.ms/m365/samples
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community in YouTube - https://aka.ms/m365/videos
• Microsoft 365 Platform Community - http://aka.ms/m365pnp

A

Hey everyone, my name is monica. I am a product manager on the graph, connectors team and today I'm going to be talking to you guys about how you can integrate graph connector content into various m365 experiences, so office.com search um and some new experiences that will be coming your way like context, iq, etc.

A

I'll first talk a little bit about what microsoft searches and what graph connectors are and and why they're useful then I'll go into a brief demo of like graph connectors in action uh alongside microsoft, search and other m365 experiences.

A

And then I will talk a little bit about how this demo was built like how can you, how can one build a graph connector, uh given the publicly available apis that we have and yeah that's the gist of it and then I'll, just kind of close with some resources and also feel free to stop me anytime and ask any questions that you'd, like I'm sure, if you have a question, there's somebody else in in the group who also has the same question. So it's just good to facilitate that dialogue, so all right cool.

A

So what is the the problem statement here so today?

A

Organizational data is growing exponentially um and a lot of this data lives in silos, and so a major problem that employees face within organizations is that they spend 20 to 30 percent of their time at work, searching for information, and they can't find the information, because this information is spread across. You know various.

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You know data silos, um so you know what what we need is modern workers to be able to find and discover that information as quickly and efficiently as possible.

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So us as microsoft, have a solution, microsoft search, which is an ai powered, modern search for your workplace and it's included within m365.

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You know, essentially, it allows users or employees across organizations to find all of their relevant and personalized content across like all of the applications.

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um You know the data's always secure and and employees can search from any device anywhere, and so how does graph connectors kind of fit into this? So essentially, like I mentioned a lot of this data lives in a bunch of silos.

A

So a lot of the items or files that you know employees work on may not be just you know: onedrive and sharepoint files, the files or items might be like servicenow articles or jira tickets, or you know, salesforce contacts opportunities like there's so many other types of items that people interact with on a day-to-day basis and so what graph connectors does it allows um your organization to connect your data into the microsoft graph into and bring that data and surface it across microsoft, search so that your you know, employees or your users can essentially find all of their relevant content using microsoft search and today we have over 130 data sources supported, and these publicly available apis enable you to develop your own custom graph.

A

Connector connected data becomes part of microsoft graph and it can participate in the in multiple m365 experiences, to name a few. We have search context, iq recommendations.

A

Viva topics will be coming discovery as well and more we're working on that all right, and then I think that brings us into our demo yeah. So let's see this in action. So it's it's about a three to four minute. Demo, you can just play that yeah click play and then take it away. Yeah I can go to any of the microsoft search endpoints, which include office.com, sharepoint and bing at work and search for marketing.

A

Under all, I can see search results from one drive in sharepoint.

A

On the same page, I can also see results from figma. If I wanted to see more figma results, I can navigate to the figma tab from here. I can open the branding case study figma file. I was looking for and continue my work.

A

After making some edits to the case study file, I want to share it in an email with meredith, a close collaborator on the project to request their feedback. I create a new email addressing it to them and write hey meredith.

A

Could you please take a look at this figma file and get back to me with your thoughts when I enter at editor using context, iq provides a list of suggested people and files relevant to me that I can include in my email, as I type more, the editor using context iq provides me a smaller list of suggestions relevant to the context of my email.

A

When I select the branding case study figma file, an adaptive card is inserted, showing the information about the item, including the title, the link last edit time and an image preview.

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This email looks good, so I press send. Sometime later, I follow up with meredith on teams to see if they were able to check out the case study I had sent over. They said they hadn't seen it yet, but that they can go to their office.com homepage to find the shared figma file. Among other recently worked on or shared items as meredith, I can navigate to office.com under quick access.

A

I am able to find the figma file bob shared with me. I can then click on it and review the file after reviewing the file. I let bob know that the case study looks great and that I'm going to share it in our team's channel, so that others can take a look and provide their thoughts.

A

I write please check out this case study bob and I worked on.

A

I can attach the case study figma file using the search, your workplace messaging extension on teams. I can select the workplace search icon here, navigate to other content and search for branding.

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When I select this figma file, an adaptive card is inserted, showing the information about the item. The message looks good, so I can go ahead and share.

A

I I think that takes us to the end of the demo awesome. Essentially, this demo outlined the power of graph connectors, so we built a custom, figma connector and demonstrated how this content can surface across search. That was the first part of the demo and then.

A

Secondly, uh we saw how that content could be searched for using context iq within outlook editor, and then it popped up that adaptive card in a very neat clean way and you're able to share that with others, and then we're able to see how that also showed up in office.com, because you know bob was bob shared that item with meredith, so it showed up in her office.com and also bobsoffice.com, and then lastly, you know we can see the power of the workplace search, your workplace message, extension to to show that figma item as well and like a clean adaptive card, and then we were able to share that uh within within teams.

A

So that's the the power of graph connectors so now, let's dive into how one could build your own graph connector. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the graph connector anatomy. What are the main pieces of it and then we'll go into some some code samples yeah. So there are three uh high level components uh to building a graph connector.

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So you know, firstly, you need to create a connection and what this entails it. You know it means you you're, defining your connection, object, you're, updating the configuration file for the experiences and you're providing additional. You know, optional connection configuration information.

A

Secondly, you need to create and register your schema and what this entails is you're, creating a new schema object properties and their attributes, labels and aliases. So you're, basically telling us, you know, for a given item. What are all the different properties that are important to that item and how do? How should all those properties behave in search and what what does each property semantically mean, and all that information is used in powering these experiences and then yeah? So you have to register the schema before adding items to the connection as well.

A

That's an important point and then, lastly, you need to index those items with their apples, so this is about bringing in that data into graph. So this means creating updating and deleting items and creating updating deleting external groups and group members. So this is part of the data sync process, so the first piece, like I mentioned, is about creating a connection. So this is a sample call, and so you need to provide some sort of connection id a descriptive name about the connection, and then you would like for enabled content experiences.

A

You essentially include what are the different experiences you want that connector to participate in and then, depending on the experience that you want to light up. There are some requirements associated with that, for example, for the office.com scenario. The activity settings piece is a requirement and within activity settings there's this piece called url to item resolvers, which basically provides us a way to resolve urls that are shared within teams and outlook to the item id.

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So we can detect that share activity between those two users and then recommend that content to those users, because you know we know that it's important to them.

A

So the second component, like I mentioned, was to create your schema or register your schema.

A

So here in this example, we have the title as one property and then we also have the author as a property, and you could add as many other properties as you'd like um and then essentially you could provide semantic labels here, so the label title basically tells us that all these semantic labels are leveraged in order to determine what properties are shown in the various experiences.

A

So in order to populate the you know, office.com experience, we need to know what the title is. We need to know what the url is. We need to know the icon, url, etc. So these semantic labels are very helpful in that way, and then the last component, like I mentioned, is to you know, create the external item and push data. So here you can include the apple, so this is who has access to that item and all like apples are honored across all of our endpoints or all of our applications.

A

Like I mentioned, the data is secure and then the property section maps directly to the schema. So you provide the actual title for that. Given item the author and then any other information, you'd like depending on what your schema was and then the content is actually the full text index you know of that content. So if it was a knowledge based article, for example, it would just be complete, like the html of the entire article itself.

A

So that's that last component yeah and then also as part of you could add activities as well as part of the item, or you can make this separate call here to append activities to the item itself. Activities is another well-known property on the item. So essentially, what activities are it's basically you're telling us who are the different users within your organization that are doing actions like creates modifies comments, views etc on that item? So this information is very useful in empowering context, iq and in outlook in office.com.

A

All of that contextual information about what items are most important to users is super super useful and powerful in really seamlessly integrating graph connectors into all the applications and making sure that the content is truly relevant.

A

So here you would include like the type of of action right there. The time in which the action happened and then an aad id of that user, who did that action cool and then that that's kind of the gist of it um that takes me to the end of the different components.

A

Hopefully it was, is pretty straightforward and you know feel free to ask any questions that you have. There are a bunch of resources that I've outlined here. If you you want to learn more, you want to just go start building graph connectors right now, so we have some admin, documentation, some developer documentation and then the connectors gallery, which shows all the connectors that are either available through the microsoft, build connectors that we have, but also the connectors that our system, integrator partners, also offer so yeah.

B

Thank you excellent, so monica let's do it this way and that, as we have one more demo coming up, we can answer the test. Few questions in the chat, but if you can answer on those in the chat, that would be awesome so, and this is really really cool stuff. It's it's actually, a surprisingly simple thing to do so, really really cool stuff thanks monica.