All Things Microsoft Cloud: Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Graph

Key Takeaways

well welcome everyone to the all things microsoft cloud my name is dan walleen i'm a cloud advocate at microsoft and i have my colleague aichabash with me today as well hi dan hi everyone my name is aicha i'm a cloud advocate at microsoft and today we have a guest yina is with us hyena welcome hello everyone thank you so much for having me here i'm excited about the conversation that we're about to have yeah so ina can you tell us about yourself they call you as mother of growl can you tell us the story behind it yeah we want to hear this yes um so i am the head of product for microsoft graph and i have been working on this initiative since it was an idea and that is maybe a decade ago so um even when i started my career at microsoft this has been the project that i have been growing and uh turning into a company-wide strategy and that's why uh you know i'm fondly known as the matter of mother of the graph yeah yeah this is awesome and uh now what do you do at graph uh you're the head of microsoft graph product right yes yes so um the product team that works on uh basically microsoft graph is like a tie that lives all boats uh it's a company-wide initiative that multiple teams actually over 100 teams across microsoft participate on and expose their data through the microsoft graph so my team basically helps with all of the life cycle of the data uh you know the getting the data exposed through apis and through high volume access patterns and that includes data modeling api architecture the documentation the you know creating all of the developer experiences like the portal the sdks the tooling all of that is part of my product team and uh yeah we've been running this initiative for quite a while that's awesome so real quick for developers that maybe haven't used microsoft graph as much give us the kind of nutshell version of you mentioned there's what over 100 teams it sounds like contributing data yes that's crazy that's a lot but if i'm a developer why would i use microsoft graph in some of my apps so think about microsoft graph is the fabric of data that describes productivity collaboration security management for not only all of the like you know large set of enterprise across the planet but also across consumers right like all of our consumer accounts all of our commercial accounts every single piece of activity every single data that piece of data that our customers interact with our products mail calendar contacts files tasks all of that is part of the microsoft graph so it's a planet scale data source around these patterns of productivity and security in the organizations that's awesome it's one of those things i'll have to admit now that i've used it a lot but before joining microsoft i hadn't and i feel like i missed out actually because and i don't say that because i work for microsoft now i say that because i didn't realize all this data as you mentioned productivity data that you could bring in so i used to build a lot of line of business apps and i kind of missed out because you know i could have brought in context sensitive data to that scenario that you know it could have been an email or a team's chat or whatever and i i didn't do that but now i do so we're good yeah since then you're saying that uh graph is uh into many solutions that we build day to day and here in the series we are talking about microsoft cloud you know i just want to ask uh how does microsoft graph fit into microsoft cloud in general yeah so when you think about microsoft product offerings we have uh platform as a service offerings with azure right like all of the compute networking storage and all of the set of um offerings that are part of azure and then we have software software as a service offerings with microsoft 365 dynamics 365 and others right and then for developers you can use the combination of all of these across our clouds to build solutions that you know meet the needs business needs across the organizations or as we were saying before across consumer needs as well so microsoft graph enables you to get all of these data and then you can use it whether it is you know building web applications or device applications or you know service applications or doing big data analytics which is also another thing that we offer of taking data that is in our services in microsoft 365 and then using things like azure synapse or purview to then analyze that data and protect the data the data cycle of data so you know microsoft graph enables you to connect across all of the different clouds at microsoft this is awesome it and there are hundreds of different data sets available that we can reach through microsoft graph graph right this is inspiring literally any data analytics solution can consume microsoft graph as well as you can bring your own data into your apps web apps mobile apps any sort of app it's so inspiring that you can use this set of resources available for you just through one single api that's the beauty of it is the unified api and secured and all that so when it comes to uh like scenarios are there any that stand out that you can give some examples of where people have leveraged microsoft graph especially in the overall microsoft cloud right absolutely so i'll tell you scenarios in three buckets because it's like when you think about all of the corpus of data that we have in microsoft graph there's actually three high-level things that you can do the first one is around accessing so accessing real-time data we're using our http based api uh in which you can build web applications we can build uh you know teams applications for example we're seeing a lot of developers built on top of teams leveraging productivity leveraging where people spend hours and hours every single day across teams across outlook all of these different services are things that you can build using our apis the second one is around analyzing so taking the data that we have on microsoft graph and then looking at patterns and deriving knowledge from that data so think about you know maybe um scenarios where you know financial industries are trying to figure out patterns of collaboration between the employees at the company at the bank and then looking at how their customer relationship is going so customer lineage is one of those scenarios and a lot of that can be information found on systems of record but what we have with microsoft graph is systems of engagement right like so it's a lot of combination like complementary information that can be used on this project to you know to derive more um more insights so that's access analyze and the third one is augment so augment is bringing data external data into microsoft graph so that you so that that can data can participate in experiences that we have across microsoft 365. so for example you know we have um an integration with figma where they bring in data that is across all of the different figma files so figma is one of the largest set of companies that is used for design um and then like having that participate into all of the search experiences that we have across microsoft search so that's windows being office.com sharepoint and have that experience there so access analyze and augment wow this is very inspiring there are many inspiring scenarios and solutions available with graph already so where can developers customers or analysts can go to learn more about graph i feel like i've been saying this for such a long time but it's one thing you got to remember and it's graph.microsoft.com yeah just that it you'll find all the information about how to connect with graph how to get started how to build applications we have tutorials that in like are going to take you through the entire journey we have graph explorer which is basically you know the place where you can go and start making queries even if you don't have an account with us you can just start playing with the api see all of the uh the data sets that we have to offer we have a microsoft graph toolkit which is basically a set of web components that like with a couple of lines of code like you're able to like build nice very beautiful looking uh um set of controls whether it is a people picker or a people card or like you know we have um you know teams channel selection we have multiple set of uh controls as part of the microsoft graph toolkit so all of that information graph.microsoft.com is the only thing that you have to remember and uh and then just go there and you know happy coding excellent excellent i i'll have to admit i love when i got started with it graphic explorer was amazing so definitely something to check out if you have awesome so this was an amazing information and we are so excited to have head of microsoft graph with us we've been using graph for uh many years now with then with you like we build many solutions using graph but it's so exciting to hear all these availabilities for microsoft graph here in pramina and we will have a lot more exciting guests joining us for microsoft cloud scenarios and we will discuss more about what is available in microsoft cloud and the other clouds as well so stay tuned thanks for watching thank you for having me