TITLE: [MUSIC]
JAMES LAU: Hello. Thank you for tuning in.
In this session, you will learn about
how you can build a graph connector to
supercharge your Microsoft Search experience
and to increase app content engagement.
I'm James Lou, Group Product Manager
and Product Lead for Graph Connectors product.
Joining me today are Mounika
and Rajdeep from my team.
Hey folks, do you want to say hi?
MOUNIKA NARAYANAN: Hi.
My name is Mounika Narayanan
and I am a PM
on the Graph Connectors team.
I primarily work on integrating
connector content and experiences
like Office Hub,
Viva Topics, and Meeting Insights.
RAJDEEP CHANDA: Hi, I'm Rajdeep Chanda.
I'm a PM on the Graph Connectors team
and I primarily work on custom connectors,
SDK, and connector platform capabilities.
JAMES LAU: Our session today is divided
into three segments.
First, I will go over the basics
of Microsoft Search and Microsoft Graph Connector.
Then Mounika will show you
a custom connector that Microsoft IT has
built and walk you through a number of
experiences that its content participates in.
Finally, Rajdeep is going to show you some code
and teach you the basics of
how you can go
about building your own custom connector,
whether you are an IT admin or a developer,
we hope that you will learn
something from our session today.
Organizations today are generating
data at a faster rate than ever,
and the pandemic has worsened
this trend in the last couple of years.
Making matters worse,
data are often created in silos,
making them more difficult to find and discover.
Multiple analysts reports have estimated
that information workers
spend anywhere between
20-30 percent of their time just searching
for the information
they need to do their jobs.
Additional productivity is lost
because people often need to
duplicate work when they couldn't
find the information they were looking for.
Modern information workers
are often frustrated by this,
and they increasingly expect to be able to find
the right information quickly
across their organizations.
But for Microsoft customers,
there is good news.
Microsoft Search, which is our AI
powered modern search engine
designed for organizations,
is already included with your
Microsoft 365 subscription.
It's built on top of the Microsoft graph,
and it takes into account user activities
and relationships with the data to provide
the most relevant and personalized search results.
Being an enterprise search product security
is obviously critical.
Microsoft Search supports security trimming to ensure
only users who are supposed to see
the data can see the search results.
Microsoft Search meets you where you are by being
available on multiple form factors
and multiple endpoints,
including Bing, SharePoint,
office.com, and Windows Search box.
Of course, with any enterprise,
search engine connectors are important.
Microsoft Search will already index
all your SharePoint online and OneDrive
for work content with zero setup.
But to increase your search completeness and coverage,
you can use graph connectors to
connect to your SaaS data sources,
your on-prem file shares,
databases or content management systems
and any other custom line of business data sources.
Microsoft Search can index all of them
and make them available for search.
Between Microsoft and our partners,
there are over 130 connectors
and you can find them at the graph connectors gallery.
You can also use the graph connectors
API to develop your own connector.
Whether you're implementing a custom connector
for your organization
or if you're a SaaS provider
wanting to make
your products content searchable
in Microsoft Search,
these are the right APIs for you to use.
But the story gets better
when data is connected to our platform.
It's really indexed into the Microsoft Graph,
which is the underlying data fabric that powers
many Microsoft 365 experiences.
What that means is that the connected data transcends
the traditional search experience
of a search box and 10 blue links,
and it can participate in
other experiences like context IQ,
content recommendations, Veeva Topics,
E-Discovery, and more.
With this platform, you're really connecting your data
to Microsoft 365 and not just search.
Now let me pass it on to Mounika to demo
what some of these experiences
look like with connected data.
Mounika, on to you.
MOUNIKA NARAYANAN: Thank you, James.
Today, I'm going to demonstrate
how an organization can leverage
graph connectors within Microsoft Search.
To show you this demo today,
we have taken the same Figma connector built
by Microsoft internally and put it in a demo tenant.
Figma is a popular web based
app used to create graphics and UI designs.
With this connector, users
within an organization can seamlessly find
and share Figma projects and files
across various Microsoft 365 services.
Let's say I have been working on
a marketing branding case study
for a marketing campaign
within my Figma application,
I can go to any of the Microsoft Search Endpoints
which include office.com,
SharePoint, and Bing at work
and search for marketing.
Under all, I can see search results
from OneDrive in SharePoint.
On the same page,
I can also see results from Figma.
If I wanted to see more Figma results,
I can navigate to the Figma tab.
From here I can open
the branding case study Figma file
I was looking for and continue my work.
After making some edits to the case study file,
I want to share it in an email with Meredith,
a close collaborator on
the project to request to their feedback.
I create a new email addressing it to them and write,
Hey Meredith, could you please
take a look at this Figma file
and get back to me
with your thoughts?
When I enter at,
editor using context IQ provides
a list of suggested people
and files relevant to me
that I can include in my email.
As I type more,
the editor using Context IQ provides me
a smaller list of suggestions
relevant to the context of my email.
When I select the ''Branding case study'' Figma file,
an adaptive card is
inserted showing me information about the item,
including the title,
the link, last edit time,
and an image preview.
This email looks good,
so I press ''Send.''
Sometime later,
I follow up with Meredith on
Teams to see if they were able to
check out the case study I had sent over.
They said they hadn't seen it yet,
but that they can go
to their office.com homepage
to find the shared Figma file
among other recently worked on
or shared items.
As Meredith, I can navigate to office.com,
under quick access,
I am able to find the Figma file Bob shared with me.
I can then click on it and review the file.
After reviewing the file,
I let Bob know that
the case study looks great
and that I'm going to share it
in our team's channel
so that others can take a look
and provide their thoughts.
I write, Please check out
this case study Bob and I worked on.
I can attach the case study Figma file using
the search your workplace messaging extension on Teams.
I can select the workplace search icon here.
Navigate to other content and search for branding.
When I select this Figma file,
an adoptive card is inserted
showing the information about the item.
The message looks good,
so I can go ahead and share.
Through this demo,
you were able to witness
firsthand the power of Microsoft search
and graph connectors in enabling users
to find the most relevant content
for multiple apps
across Microsoft 365 services.
Now I'm going to pass it off
to Rajdeep to talk a bit
about how you can build your own
custom graph connector,
just like the one that was demoed today.
Take it away, Rajdeep.
RAJDEEP CHANDA: Thanks, Mounika.
Now I'm going to explain
how you can build your
custom connectors
using graph APIs.
First, you will need to create a connection.
This is a very simple call
and I will highlight
the graph endpoint
for you here.
You just put in an ID,
name, and description.
The ID is something you will need in
subsequent calls and the name and
description are the strings
that will show up
in the connectors Admin UX.
The enabled content experiences list
includes the list of experiences
you want your connection
to participate in,
and each experience has its own set of requirements.
For example, the office.com recommendations experience,
requires activity settings,
which takes us to this next section.
Within activity settings,
you can provide a way to resolve
URLs to item IDs by providing a set of base URLs,
a regular expression pattern
to pass the rest of the URL
and a way to construct the item ID.
This functionality is used to detect
share activity of these items,
which in turn is used
to generate content recommendations.
Next, you need to create a schema
for the connection
that you just created.
Note that Figma connector here
is the connection ID
that was passed in the earlier call.
In the body of this call you define the schema,
which is a list of properties that
each item ingested later will have.
For each property,
you define the property's name
and data type
and also a set of
optional behaviors for the property,
whether it is searchable,
retrievable, variable or definable.
If you are not familiar with what these attributes mean,
you can learn more about them in our documentation.
We have recently added
support for something called labels.
Labels allow you to pass in a collection of
well known strings to tell Microsoft Graph
what this property semantically means.
In this example, even
though the property is called Figma title,
you are saying that semantically it means title,
so the graph will know how to use this property in
things like relevance
or default display templates.
There are several other well-known strings
you can use for labels
and we will likely be
adding more in the future.
Now that you have created
the connection and the connection schema,
it's time for you to start
adding items into this collection.
To do that, you do a put on this endpoint.
Note that you can use any ID that you want to
and this quite often
could come from the source data.
In the body of the create external item column,
there are three sections.
The echo section allows you
to specify your access control list
for this item to ensure only the groups
and users you want will be able to see this item
anywhere in the Microsoft 365 experiences.
In the next section you specify
the properties of this item
and they should adhere to the schema
that you define for the connection.
The last section is content
which allows you to specify
the body of the item in either HTML or text format.
Anything you put here will automatically
be added to the full text indexed.
In summary, create connection, create schema,
and create external item
are the three key API calls you
need to know about to get
started with creating a connector.
We are also adding the capability to add activities on
an external item to light up
the experiences we just showcased.
To do that, you do a post on this endpoint.
Note that you need
to use the ID of the external item
for which you want to add activities,
define the type of activity,
the time of occurrence of the activity,
and the actor of the activity.
You can see the area of the user
being added to identify
who performed the activity.
Now that you have seen
how to build your custom connectors
using Graph APIs accessible
through the Microsoft Graph SDK.
I would like to announce that very
soon you will also be able to develop
custom connectors using
the Microsoft Graph Connectors SDK
built specifically to help you
develop your custom connectors efficiently.
You can quickly get started with
the graph connectors SDK by downloading
our connector template
and writing minimal code
in up to 11 languages.
You will also be able to leverage
the in-built capabilities of
our Connector platform for control orchestration,
identity management, connection management, and more.
You can also test your code using
our test utility with pre-built test scenarios.
Finally, you can publish your connection
through the M365 admin center
and leverage it as a single place to manage
and monitor all your
custom connectors as well as
Microsoft Build Connectors.
Those are the basics you need to know
for building your custom connector.
James, back to you.
JAMES LAU: Thank you,
Rajdeep and Mounika.
In summary, we have talked about
how the combination
of Microsoft search
and graph connectors
can deliver a world class intelligent
search experience for your workplace.
We walked through some of the innovative experiences in
Microsoft 365 that your Connector content
can deeply integrate into.
We also went over the nuts and bolts of how
you can go about building your own custom connector.
Here are some resources that should be useful to
you if you decide to explore graph connectors further.
You can visit our admin documentation site to learn
about how to set up and configure connectors.
You can visit our developer documentation site
to see our getting started guide,
sample code, API reference docs and Postman collection.
Finally, you will find all the graph connectors
available in our ecosystem from the Connectors Gallery.
With that, I would like to thank
you again for joining us today.
I hope you have learned something new in
this session and that you will start
exploring how you can use
or build your own connectors to deeply integrate
your data into Microsoft 365
so that your data can be more easily found,
discovered, and engaged with.
Thank you.