Office 365 – Integration with Office 365 APIs

Greg Olsen, 10 February 2015

As we continue to work more and more with Office 365, we are likely require some form of integration from our custom application or business system with Office 365. The Office 365 platform has some APIs available for integration, which will also allow our hybrid systems to integrate with the cloud.

The Office 365 APIs are exposed using the REST architecture. The following API areas (you could also say these a Office 365 data areas) are available now for you to interact or integrate with.

• Mail – read, compose and send messages and attachments, manage folders in a user's mailbox in Office 365 or Exchange Online
• Calendar - provides access to a user's contacts and contact folders in Office 365 or Exchange Online
• Contacts - provides access to events, calendars, and calendar groups in Exchange Online as part of Office 365
• Files – provides access to work with OneDrive for Business Files and Folders
• Discovery Service – to interact with the Discovery Service API you send HTTP and OData requests. Discovery Service supports discovering Calendar, Contacts, Mail, MyFiles (for OneDrive and OneDrive for Business service endpoints), and RootSite (for SharePoint).
So what can you do with these APIs? Head to this URL for detailed information on each, it’s quite useful. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/api/api-catalog

I wanted to included this illustration (taken from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/platform-development-overview), which clearly shows you must be authenticated first before accessing the Office 365 data layer.

The illustration also shows you can choose your desired application programming language along with your development environment toolset when working with non-Microsoft toolsets such as XCode or Eclipse/Android Studio. 

Some Helpful Links

Below are some helpful links when working with the Office 365 APIs. These can also help you get started.

Office 365 APIs starter projects, code samples, and videos

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/starter-projects-and-code-samples

Office 365 Starter Project for ASP.NET MVC

If you want to get a look at some starter code, have a look at this one:

https://github.com/OfficeDev/Office-365-APIs-Starter-Project-for-ASPNETMVC

Authentication

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/common-app-authentication-tasks

Enjoy!