Working with Teams in the Microsoft Graph

It’s not surprising that Teams has grow to be one of the fastest rising apps in Microsoft 365. Lockdowns and get the job done-from-household policies for the duration of the recent pandemic have pushed collaboration tools this sort of as Teams to the fore, earning them the substitution for all the interactions in the present day office. Applications are now the place men and women go to get the job done, to chat, and to share details about jobs and jobs, escalating from chat, to voice phone calls, to video meetings as vital.

Teams is a lot more than a conferencing and collaboration area. Like a lot of the Workplace suite, it’s element of the Microsoft Graph, a established of APIs that presents entry to person and enterprise info saved in the Microsoft 365 cloud. The Microsoft Graph is a lot more than a storage layer, it’s a way to interact right with the Workplace software suite and establish new apps that can use the Microsoft 365 platform.

Making use of the Microsoft Graph to automate Teams

Making use of the Microsoft Graph, we can generate code that interacts right with Teams, programmatically generating collaboration spaces and injecting material the place vital. That tactic allows us do matters this sort of as linking Teams into IT management tools, mechanically creating a digital staff in reaction to an incident, populating it with the acceptable material from units management tools, and closing the staff and archiving any chat spaces or shared material when the incident finishes.

Automating Teams like this is a lot more than generating bots. It builds on existing workflows by providing a position to seize material and details that may well if not be lost in particular person-to-particular person chats. We normally reduce likely vital details in casual interaction channels, the place it’s forgotten before composing submit-motion reviews and submit-mortem examination. Automating interactions can help make sure that distant staff know that a job is waiting around for them and makes it possible for you to observe that jobs are becoming accomplished.

Doing the job with the Teams Graph APIs

Making use of the Graph to produce a Crew is straightforward enough, employing the Microsoft 365 produce_group operation. The Microsoft 365 Graph APIs for Teams are all RESTful, and you can interact with them employing SDKs or by way of your very own HTTP interactions. Developing a new group involves a solitary Submit operation, environment the group title, whether it’s general public or private, and whether it is available in Outlook mail, alongside with configuring descriptions and nicknames.

Customers need to be additional by their Graph ID. It involves a different query to get people IDs before you build the Rest Submit that makes the staff. As element of the query, you also need to determine at the very least two staff customers as homeowners, with admin rights for the staff. You can only incorporate up to twenty customers when generating a group any supplemental customers will need to be additional employing the incorporate_member API, with at the very least a one-next delay among every single addition.

The API get in touch with returns the group ID, which is required for any graph interactions with the group. At the time you have a group in position, which can just take some time, you can swiftly change that group into a staff employing a solitary Submit motion, contacting a Graph API to take care of the conversion. Once more you’re introduced with an ID, this time for your new staff. At the time you have finished employing a momentary staff, your Teams admin can take away it manually or employing the Graph APIs.

Making use of Graph Explorer to style and design queries

It’s worthy of employing Microsoft’s Graph Explorer services to exam out your Rest queries before you put into practice them. Graph Explorer is a helpful tool that performs with the recent release API and any beta APIs that you’re looking at employing. It exhibits each the structure of a get in touch with and any responses produced by the API. By default, the Graph Explorer performs against a sample tenant, although you can log in and use it against your very own Microsoft Graph info.

Microsoft endorses mixing Graph phone calls with Teams webhooks for your apps. The Graph API is greatest for dealing with reduced-level graph objects, this sort of as people and teams. At the time you have people in position, you can then use the API to query your Teams occasion for material. Interactions with a staff by way of chat and by way of adaptive cards are greatest carried by way of webhooks, employing asynchronous phone calls in your apps. As Teams interactions are centered on functions and messages, the blend of programmatic staff management by way of Teams’ Graph API and webhook-centered functions really should give you the flexibility to establish, run, and use dynamic groups as and when required.

You are not restricted to employing reduced-level code with Teams. At Create 2020 Microsoft introduced that it would extend its Electric power Automate integrations to Teams, providing you a reduced-code route to introducing Teams as an endpoint to business enterprise process automation. With Teams featuring each structured and advert-hoc collaboration, it requires a way to deliver applications that aid each ways of doing work: a product that performs effectively with centralized Microsoft Graph-centered apps and staff and workgroup automation from the Electric power System.