SOLVED

What is the Office Graph?

Microsoft

Office Graph - the intelligent fabric to Office 365 data

The Office Graph represents a collection of content and activity, and the relationships between them that happen across the entire Office suite. From email, social conversations, and meetings, to documents in SharePoint and OneDrive, the Office Graph maps the relationships among people and information, and acts as the foundation for Office experiences that are more relevant and personalized to each individual. The Office Graph uses sophisticated machine learning techniques to connect people to the relevant content, conversations and people around them. 

 

Delve OfficeGraph.png

 

Office Graph has mapped over billions actions and interactions within Office 365, making it clear that organizations have been sitting on an untapped gold mine of business value.  


As it continues to analyze relationships and deliver insights from across the tools people use at work every day, it will enable experiences that go above and beyond search and discovery. Going forward, the Office Graph will continue to evolve and deliver increasingly rich insights in Office 365, and incorporate 
support for extensibility to reach beyond Office 365.  

 

14 Replies
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

Well, it's the Microsoft Graph now. It was renamed at the Build conference in November 2015...

Office Graph is part of / used by Microsoft Graph.

 

Office Graph = signals etc on item interaction

Microsoft Graph = API endpoint for all things Office 365. The /me endpoint has functions driven by 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."

Which is the same "Builds on the Office Graph", "Office Graph is the fabric". But the Microsoft Graph has API's for Exchange, SharePoint, Groups etc as well, API's which has been there a long time, and which have now been wrapped into the Microsoft Graph API. Some of the /me/ endpoints in the API are indeed driven by the Office Graph, many are not :) It's all in the documentation at http://graph.microsoft.io/en-us/docs
@Tony - The Microsoft Graph and the Office Graph are different things. The Office Graph is the "search on steroids" as used in Delve for instance, whereas the Microsoft Graph is a wrapper (graph) API that connects to the Azure AD Graph (will eventually be deprecated), EXO, SPO, Office Graph etc.
Thanks. The fog that surrounded me on this topic is slowly clearing. I think I have it straight now. I'll go back to thinking about VAX COBOL, when the world was a simpler place...
I'm not sure about that Tony, MS Graph and Office Graph is two very different teams (Seattle vs Oslo) and two very different technologies (proxy vs search). As I said MS Graph is the API (actually just a proxy) that surfaces AD, Exchange, SharePoint, Excel and Office Graph data. Office Graph for instance does the calculated relationships between documents and/or people.
Thanks!

Does advanced threat analytics feed information into Graph?

Highly doubt that. See this support article about what you have signals on. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Connect-and-collaborate-in-Office-Delve-46f92806-b52c-4187-...

Further to the comments about Microsoft Graph vs. Office Graph, the latter name seems to have fallen out of use and has been replaced by the term "Insights". The Insights API in the Microsoft Graph contains the search-type features (my recent files, items trending around me, etc.). This removes the confusion and, as luck would have it, the name Microsoft Graph aligns perfectly with Microsoft 365 which is more descriptive of the scope of the API which isn't just Office.

So , can we say that "Insights" is used in Delve ? Is that why search results are different for Delve and Microsoft o365 Search ?
You could say that :)

@Michael Holste Is Graph included with my company's Office 365? Or does it cost extra?

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

Well, it's the Microsoft Graph now. It was renamed at the Build conference in November 2015...

View solution in original post