Ever heard someone mention the Microsoft Graph and not known what it is? In this article, we’ll dive deeper into what the graph is and what it can provide you access to.
What is the Microsoft Graph?
In a nutshell, the Microsoft Graph is designed to be a one-stop shop (ie a single endpoint) for interacting with the Microsoft suite of products. For now it’s limited to only a subset of Microsoft’s product range, but Microsoft has grand ambitions for continuing to grow this over time.
Delve, Excel, Microsoft Bookings, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook/Exchange, Planner, and SharePoint as well as many enterprise and mobility services are currently supported.
The key difference between the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft’s previous service-specific APIs is that the Graph is designed around user scenarios and is independent of the service that customers may interact with.
For example, where previously you may have directly called anOutlook API to access a user’s calendar, using the Graph you simply interact with Calendar data directly without caring about the service.
One side-effect of the Graph is that instead of each Microsoft product having its own platform-specific SDK, you can use one SDK to access them all. You can find a full list of the SDKs here, but platforms include iOS, Android, .NET, PHP, Ruby and Python.
Does the API use GraphQL?
No – while the “Microsoft Graph” name may confuse some, the API itself is a normal REST API and doesn’t use GraphQL at this point in time.
Can anyone use the API or do you need to be a partner?
Anyone can sign up to use the Graph API for free.Many of the customer scenarios around email, contacts and calendars are available for use in production apps today.
Keep in mind that some APIs are still in beta (such as The ones backed by Microsoft Booking) and as such shouldn’t be used in production apps yet.