Office 365 Application Development

You can create custom solutions that access and interact with all the richness of a user’s Office 365 data—and you can build those solutions across all mobile, web, and desktop platforms.

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  Office 365 APIs enable you to provide access to Office 365 data, including their mail, calendars, contacts, files, and folders. All right from within your app itself.
  
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  Whether you're building web applications using .NET, PHP, Java, Python, or Ruby on Rails, or creating apps for Windows 8, Universal Apps, iOS, Android, or on another device platform. It's your choice.
  

Now, you can extend Office 365 itself. Customize how your data and experiences are displayed within and interact with Office 365 to provide a seamless user experience.

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  Create a FileHandler add-in to control how SharePoint Online displays and interacts with your custom file types, including custom file type icons, file preview within the Office 365 UI, and opening the file type in a custom editor. And since FileHandler add-ins host their data and logic remotely, you can develop your add-in using the language, tools, and web development stack of your choice.
  
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  Add your app to the app launcher to give it visibility and make it accessible right from the Office 365 home page. Take advantage of Azure AD single sign-on to provide seamless access to your app for authorized users.
  

Office 365 Enterprise provides administrators a variety of developer features to keep their domains and subscriptions effective and well-tuned.

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  Access the Reporting web service to build reporting dashboards, charts, and graphs to help their organization manage their subscription usage.
  
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  Use the Office 365 Service Communications API (preview) to retrieve real-time service health information and Message Center communications for the domains that they own or manage. This enables them to monitor service health, manage communications, and develop plans to respond to upcoming service maintenance.
  
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  Use the Office 365 Management Activity API to retrieve information about various user, admin, system, and policy actions and events from Office 365 and Azure AD activity logs. Use this information to build solutions that provide monitoring, analysis, and data visualizations.
  

How do the Office 365 APIs work?

The Office 365 APIs are REST services that provide access to high-value data from Office 365 services:

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  Mail, calendars, and contacts from Exchange Online
  
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  Files and folders from SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business
  
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  Users and groups from Azure AD
  

And with the simplicity of REST, you don't need any specialized Exchange, SharePoint, or Azure AD knowledge to access these services.

Select the language, development platform, and hosting environment you want. Build using any web language, including JavaScript, HTML5, Python, Ruby, PHP, and ASP.NET. Use Visual Studio, Eclipse, Android Studio, Xcode, or the IDE of your choice. Host your apps in Microsoft Azure or any cloud platform you choose.

Then use single sign-on with Azure AD to authenticate your users and let them access email, files, calendar, and user information, and the petabytes of data that are stored in Office 365.

First, set up your developer environment. Then start building your first iOS, Android, JavaScript or ASP.NET app that uses the Office 365 APIs.

Resources

Microsoft Virtual Academy Courses …

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  Office 365 Developer Overview
  
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  Deep Dive into the Office 365 App Model
  
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  Deep Dive: Integrate Office 365 APIs in Your Web Apps
  
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  Advanced Web Development with the Office 365 APIs
  
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  Advanced Web Development Using Angular with Office 365 APIs
  
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  Getting Started with Mobile App Development with the Office 365 APIs
  

Read …

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  Overview of developing on the Office 365 platform
  
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  Set up your Office 365 development environment
  
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  Office 365 app authentication and resource authorization
  

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  Office 365 API sandbox
  
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  Office 365 OAuth sandbox
  
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  Office 365 API code samples and videos
  
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  Resource reference for the Mail, Calendar, and Contacts REST APIs
  
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  Get started with Office 365 Management APIs
  

Microsoft Graph

Microsoft Graph exposes multiple APIs from Office 365 and other Microsoft cloud services through a single endpoint: https://graph.microsoft.com. Microsoft Graph simplifies queries that would otherwise be more complex.

You can use Microsoft Graph to:

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  Access data from multiple Microsoft cloud services, including Azure Active Directory, Exchange Online as part of Office 365, SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote, and Planner.
  
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  Navigate between entities and relationships.
  
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  Access intelligence and insights from the Microsoft cloud (for commercial users).
  

Microsoft Graph development stack

Why use Microsoft Graph?

Keeping the end user experience at the center, the Microsoft Graph unlocks new productivity scenarios by:

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  Enabling corporate IT to rapidly build solutions for employees.
  
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  Enabling developers to build inline social experiences.
  
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  Empowering partners to customize their Office experience and extend their apps with Office 365 data.
  

The Microsoft Graph, located at graph.microsoft.com, allows applications to access digital work and digital life data across the intelligent Microsoft cloud.

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  Consistent and unified. Microsoft Graph provides a consistent and interlinked API for working with a wide variety of types of data across Microsoft services. Developers can traverse their organizational hierarchy, discover tasks and groups associated with those users, and use organizational insights to find active working relationships between teams.
  
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  Available on devices and services. Microsoft Graph has a growing set of SDKs for devices and for services – so whether you’re working on Android apps, creating a .net Azure web site, or building a Ruby service, you can quickly incorporate Graph data into your application.
  
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  Growing support for Hybrid and On-Premises. Increasingly, Microsoft Graph will offer support hybrid deployments, meaning that organizations can flexibly expose on-premises and cloud services behind one consistent endpoint. 
  

The articles in Getting started building Microsoft Graph apps section provide detailed guidance on how to build apps that connect to Microsoft Graph across a variety of languages and development platforms. Each article starts with a sample starter project for the appropriate platform, and walks you through adding functionality that authenticates the user and makes a sample request to have Microsoft Graph send an email from their account.

SharePoint and Microsoft Graph API Beta now available

This functionality is an early developer preview and is only available through the Microsoft Graph API beta endpoint. The API design is likely to change as we incorporate feedback from developers.

The SharePoint API in Microsoft Graph supports the following core scenarios:

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  Access to SharePoint sites, lists, and drives (via document libraries)
  
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  Read-only support for site and list resources (no ability create new sites or lists)
  
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  Read-write support for listItems and driveItems
  
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  Address resources by SharePoint ID, URL, or relative path
  

The SharePoint API exposes three major resource types:

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  Site (top-level object)
  
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  List
  
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  ListItem
  

Read Working with SharePoint sites in Microsoft Graph article for more information.

Resources

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  Microsoft Graph homepage
  

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  Overview of Microsoft Graph
  
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  Graph Explorer
  
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  Samples & SDKs
  
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  Nine samples showing how to connect to Office 365 using the Microsoft Graph API (iOS, PHP, Android, Ruby, Nodejs, Python, Angular, UWP, AspNewMVC)
  
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  Four samples demonstrating common Microsoft Graph API operations (Angular, iOS, Android, UWP)