Microsoft Graph

While working from home, visibility into your meeting and free times is important and can decrease unneeded interruptions. While there are some commercial options available such as free “busy” lights and conference room calendar displays like Robin, we decided to look at what we could create in-house.

Microsoft has great documentation on how to get started with its Graph API. An API test called Graph Explorer helps with a short walk through. The basic calendar app is a good start, but we decided to take it a few steps further.

1. We wanted this to be able to go outside conference rooms in the future, but would also be nice at home if you wanted to let members of your household know you were busy.
2. We wanted to have the code easily deployed in Azure and update through GitHub.
3. It would be required to work with SSO and Multifactor.
4. An easy way to deploy this anywhere on basically any device.

The entire code is now available on our GitHub (https://github.com/FSi-Strategies) and we will be doing periodical updates in the future. (hint: it will take less than 5 minutes to deploy!)

What we did

Added a node/express backend so we could have Azure Webapp run in it.

We also added a small portion of CSS and Javascript to have the main page change, based on meetings and by set an interval to check for new meetings every minute.

We used graph explorer to figure out the new API calls that we would be using, such as “calendar with time parameter”.

Last but not least, we used Azure WebApps to pull the code automatically from GitHub.

Innovating with Microsoft Graph was a great deal of fun and we intend to complete ongoing updates to the app adding new features. We also ordered a raspberry pi and display to have this display on the outside of our conference rooms.

How could you use this app? At home, in your conference rooms? Let us know! Stay connected to FSi (Linkedin & Twitter) for the information on this app and innovations from FSi.