What is the Office Graph?

That's not the way that Rob Leifferts (Microsoft GM) represented the situation when I interviewed him at the time of Connect (http://windowsitpro.com/blog/sixty-million-office-365-target-for-developers). Here are some extracts from this piece, which I ran past Rob before publication:

"The big news announced at the Microsoft Connect () developer event yesterday is the “Microsoft Graph”, an evolution of what was known previously as the Office Graph (for more details, see their blog post). As you might know, the Office Graph is the “intelligent fabric” that gathers signals about the activities of Office 365 users to be able to map the relationships between people."

"Microsoft Graph builds on the experience of the Office Graph and work done on graph databases by Microsoft Research (here’s one example) to become the single entry point for an integrated graph that draws information from multiple data sources. In effect, you can think of the Microsoft Graph as having the ability to draw from many different sources within Microsoft cloud services and making that information available to developers through a unified REST-based API (previewed earlier this year at the Build conference)."

"Microsoft views the Graph and the API as one and the same thing; in graph terminology, I guess that the API exposes the nodes and edges that represent the various data sources represented by the Microsoft Graph with a good helping of intelligent algorithms to make the connections seamless and interesting. The data remains in the various repositories: in this case, because the first iteration of Microsoft Graph exposes APIs, data, and intelligence from Office 365 and Azure Active Directory, the data comes from Azure Active Directory, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and so on. You can expect more sources to be connected in the future."