First published on CloudBlogs on Nov, 19 2015
Howdy folks, Those of you who have seen my presentations on Azure AD know that our GraphAPI is the one of the things I think is the most exciting and innovative elements of Azure AD. So you can imagine that I am just totally psyched that Yesterday at the Connect() conference in New York, the Office Extensibility and Azure Active Directory teams announced the General Availability (GA) of the Microsoft Graph (formerly "Office 365 unified API" as previewed at //build earlier this year) which takes that innovation and extends it across the combined surface of Azure AD & Office365. With the Microsoft Graph, developers are empowered to more easily build smart, people-centric applications that can easily interact with data from all touch points of modern work.

Via the Microsoft Graph – with end user experience at the center of all we do – we are unlocking new productivity scenarios by:

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

Microsoft Graph

The Microsoft Graph, located at https://graph.microsoft.com , allows applications to access digital work and digital life data across the intelligent Microsoft cloud. It represents three big advantages for developers not available before:

• A Unified Microsoft API endpoint for accessing the capabilities of the Microsoft cloud.
• Unified access to data living in the Microsoft cloud,
• Unified access to intelligence and insights coming from the Microsoft cloud.

In other words, the Microsoft Graph surfaces intelligent insights by bringing together smart machine learning algorithms with a wealth of data and user behavior – all with just a single authorization token. We think this is a huge step forward in how developers access Microsoft cloud services and data. But don't just take our word for it. Our innovative partners, such as Do.com , Skyhigh Networks , officeatwork , Smartsheet , TechnologyOne and CloudLock have already started using the Microsoft Graph to transform their respective industries. You can see what they've done and what they think of Microsoft Graph here . Here are a few quotes on what they think of Microsoft Graph:

• "Microsoft Graph is about drastically simplifying developer experience. It allowed us to set ourselves up for all the future integrations we want to do with Microsoft products."
• "Microsoft Graph allows us to use the full breadth of Office 365 and Azure Active Directory APIs, streamlining development and improving developer productivity"
• "…using Microsoft Graph companies can leverage the massive productivity gains of Office 365…"

Microsoft Graph: What's Available Today Below are details of what's generally available, and what's in preview, via the Microsoft Graph on graph.microsoft.com:

• GA (ready for production) - Users, Files, Messages, Groups, Events, Contacts (personal), Mail, Calendar, Devices and other directory objects and docs.
• Preview (available to explore) – Notifications, People, Organizational contacts, Office Graph (insights), Planner, OneNote, Converged auth flow support (sign users in with commercial or consumer accounts to access data exposed by Microsoft Graph)

Developer access to get started on coding is at no charge. Access to customer data is included in the Office 365 license, and this includes all the APIs we have released this week. Get started today Start Coding – Visit graph.microsoft.com to get all the documentation, code samples, sdks, graph explorer and much more. Sign Up —Visit the dev.office.com and click the Sign Up button to join a vibrant and growing community of developers building solutions for Office 365. More on Office Dev —Visit dev.office.com/getting-started to get started with Office development Looking Ahead We are working hard with groups across Microsoft to bring more services into the Microsoft Graph and deepen the functionality available there so that you can access all of the data that your applications and services need from a single, connected API. Expect to see a bunch more progress over the next several months, and keep an eye on dev.office.com/blogs for updates. As always, we'd love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think! Best regards, Alex Simons (Twitter: @Alex_A_Simons ) Director of Program Management Microsoft Identity Division