Microsoft 365 Community Microsoft Graph, 1 Mar 2022

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From YouTube: What's new with Profile Photos API on Microsoft Graph

Description

In this 10-minute developer focused demo - Harald Liavaag shares Microsoft Graph v1 improvements that significantly address User Profile Photo incoherence. Graph now supports enterprise and consumer user photos, larger photos (for hi-def), Weak eTags, and If-None-Match. Additionally, more Microsoft apps across Microsoft 365 are accessing photos through Graph. Graph is becoming single photo endpoint for 1st and 3rd party applications. Access photos in Graph using me, ID or principal name. This is the one API to use for user photos across Microsoft 365. This PnP Community demo is taken from the weekly Microsoft 365 Platform Community call recorded on March 1, 2022.

Demo Presenter: Harald Liavaag (Microsoft)

Supporting material:
• Tool - Graph Explorer | aka.ms/ge

Learn more:
• Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community at: http://aka.ms/m365pnp
• Visit the Microsoft 365 Patterns and Practices community YouTube channel: https://aka.ms/m365pnp/videos

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So hi, I am uh harold liaborg an engineer in the people platform group and I'm excited to talk to you today about user profile photos.

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First, user profile photos are important. They are like ambassadors that represent who we are and influence how others perceive us. They appear in nearly all applications and bring life to experiences today. I first want to quickly go over one of the major problems we are going to solve and the role amos graf is intended to play in solving it, and next talk about some recent improvements that have been made in ms craft in the user profile photo space.

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So there is a number of different photo sources that come into play for a single user and between some of the sources. There are sync mechanisms as well.

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On top of that, there are multiple photo apis in use which use one or more of the photo sources. Even apis that are documented have already been deprecated as a result of multiple apis being used. There is incoherence, users, sometimes see different photos of themselves and others across multiple experiences in m365 and sometimes even within the same application.

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Sometimes all photos appear instead of new ones. Other times old photos appear, even when a user or tenant admin has taken actions to remove them. This can even be harmful for the users as an example for adele. Here, the same photo is seen in teams in her me control and live persona card and outlook, but sharepoint shows a different old photo.

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Such inconsistencies is something microsoft is dedicated to fix, to provide consistent user profile photos within m365.

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So what does the user profile photo and coherence problem have to do with ms graph?

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Well, for those not ms graph plays a key role in the strategy to solve user profile, photo in coherence to be the one endpoint to use both for first part applications and third-party applications for both enterprise and msa user profile photos, and when I say msa I mean microsoft. Service accounts also known as consumer such as outlook.com hotmail.com, and what are the benefits?

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We'll get we'll get a single source of truth and coherence, we'll get the unified programming model, clients get built in graph functionality for free, such as batching, powershell, sdk and so forth, and we can eventually actually deprecate and take down all the other photo apis for those not familiar with the user profile photo endpoint.

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Here is what a typical request look like these are among the most popular most frequently used requests made in ms graph. Now, let's talk about some recent improvements we've made when it comes to improvements that have been made recently. Several of those affect the incoherence problem.

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There is an ongoing internal campaign to ensure that all internal applications move to ms craft for photo operations. Already a number of partners have moved and the effort continues, as such user profile photo and coherence has already been reduced.

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Another important improvement that affects the goal of moving all photo traffic to ms graph is that support for msa user profile photos has been enabled in ms graph v1.

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It has been available in beta for a while and multiple improvements have been made, especially when it comes to reducing latency.

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This means that for the first time, ms graph v1 supports both enterprise and consumer user profile photos, and obviously such support is required to have all applications moved to ms graph also for consumer scenarios.

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It is worth noting, however, that third-party applications do not have access to the user, read-all scope, so supported, photo requests for third party applications are limited to retrieving and updating your own user profile photo. There has also been a few more functional improvements.

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One such is that we allow uploading larger photos and on retrieval the default. Behavior is to return the photo in the uploaded size, as such clients can get more high definition photos, as seen in this example, where earlier, only a predefined set of photo sizes were available for retrieval and none larger than 648 by 648, and, as you can see here, the height and width is larger still for backward compatibility. We still support retrieval of those predefined photo sizes.

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Another functional improvement is that e-texts are returned in weekly tag formats, rather than strong. As seen with the w prefix now weak e tags indicate that content is semantically, the same, not byte for byte identical as strongly tags for user profile photo requests. It does make sense that the same weak e tag is returned, no matter what size of the photo is requested and is only changed when the actual photo content is updated related to etag. Another basic functionality. Improvement is that support has been added for if non-match request header.

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So when used on a get a 200 status is returned only if it doesn't have an e tag. Matching the given ones.

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If etag matches a 304, not modified is returned without the actual photo resource, as seen in this example. Now, let me just quickly show that you can try this out yourself in graph explorer here. I've logged in on the test tenant enterprise as adele vance, and there are three types of photo requests that can be made.

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One is the lee photo value.

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The two other requests are you, you can either use the id or you can use the user principle name.

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Now, let's, let's, let's look up another user.

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Now here is an example of a large photo that was not previously supported. If you only request photo and not value, you can look at the dimensions 692 by 1038.

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What you can also immediately see is, is the weak e tag, so let's look at it and 515c and what happens if I request a smaller photo.

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Smaller photo is returned, while e-tag remains the same.

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Let me also just quickly show the new support or, if not much,.

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As expected, we get the three or four not modified.

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Let me just also show that in this example, I've been logged in with the outlook account and the behavior seen there is exactly the same. Weak key tags same support for, if not match, and as I mentioned, this is the first time we have support for consumer profile photos on ms graph v1.

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So, to summarize, microsoft is dedicated to fix the user profile photo in coherence problem and we are making heavy investments on ms graph to fix incoherence and to be the one api to use for user profile photos across m365 for both first party and third-party applications for both enterprise and msa user profile photos.

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So some next steps we will continue our efforts to move more partners to msproff for retrieving and updating user profile.

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Another thing is that that we will, it still remains to roll out the recent improvements to ms graph government cloud environments, but there are further opportunities. We hope that the baton misgraph will allow faster innovation through one endpoint and much more improvements in the user profile photo space, including enabling richer self-expression experiences.

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We love to get feedback github graph community. Let us know what you look forward to have on graph related to user profile photos. Thank you. Excellent, really, cool stuff, hara, awesome, awesome, awesome stuff. So the fact that you can get the resized images directly from craft is really really really cool.