Streamline your work with Microsoft Graph | Tips & Tricks

Key Takeaways

hi i'm bob german a cloud advocate at microsoft i'm here to share tips and tricks about how applications that use the microsoft graph can streamline work for users think about all the apps you use today there are probably a lot of them right now imagine you could combine them not just randomly but in ways that support the work you have to get done that's the idea for my demo today and it's a pattern i've seen over and over again from our customers and partners for example consider the common occurrence of planning a customer visit where do you start well probably by looking at your calendar and then you might want to prepare by looking up the customer in your crm system perhaps look up recent transactions case anything unusual has happened and also there's contracts those might be in microsoft 365 along with photos that have been taken in previous visits and of course you're going to have to get there so you'll need a map or some kind of directions maybe a weather forecast so you know how to dress that day and if you have any other questions you're probably asking your teammates now that's a lot of app juggling but the challenge is not so much that you're using a lot of different apps it's that every app is organized differently so it's up to the user to connect the dots to browse and search in each app for the information that's relevant to in this case a customer visit so if you visit customers maybe a few times a year that's probably fine but what if you're a field service technician an insurance adjuster or a visiting nurse and you and your teammates are going to new customers every day what if your company employs dozens or hundreds of these people all that wasted time and overhead will absolutely add up so now let me show you a possible solution and remember this is just a pattern that could be applied to many different situations here i am in microsoft teams and i'm running a custom application inside of teams which is a great place to put it because my users are already there i'm logged in as katie and katie can see her colleagues and her calendar with only the customer visits showing she can also browse to the other colleagues now all this information of course is coming from the microsoft graph if i open up one of the visits you can see that i've brought in not only the transactions and the customer information but also the documents and the photos for this customer again from the microsoft graph along with a map and a weather forecast using other cloud services now imagine that katie is going to look at her calendar and realize there's no way she's going to make that 2 30 appointment there's just not enough time to get there after the 1 30 so she's going to ask her team for a little bit of help well apps can send messages into teams as well again using the microsoft graph and so this message gets sent in along with a deep link back to the application so there's the there's the message now suppose i'm running around somewhere and i'm on my phone and i go into microsoft teams and i see that message from katie if i click on it it's going to bring me right into the app where i can see all that same contextual information without having to look it all up again and hopefully i can help katie out i've seen this kind of pattern in many different industries maybe you're trying to monitor what's going on on the floor of a hospital or a manufacturing station or maybe it's about seeing all the aspects of a product or an investment portfolio of course all these industries rely heavily on line of business apps but they also use productivity and collaboration tools like microsoft 365. apps that bring the two together can streamline work significantly for their users so let's take a look at how this works the microsoft graph is just a rest api meaning it's easy to call from any web browser or modern development environment here are the calls i used in the demo to get my colleagues i looked for my manager and then navigated to his or her direct reports to read the calendar was a single call with a filter on date to enumerate the files in the contracts library while i had to go get the library so there was a couple of steps involved i could cache that information if i wanted to but then it's a fairly straightforward thing to get the files inside and to send a message into a teams channel was pretty simple too now the microsoft graph is a secured api and that's because microsoft 365 users expect their data to be secured so you'll need to obtain an access token in order to call these apis you can learn how to do all of this in single page apps in a new series of hands-on labs in our microsoft learn website here are the urls please do check them out and thanks for watching don't forget to like and subscribe for more microsoft 365 developer videos