Microsoft continues to expand its services and bring more functionalities into Microsoft Graph. The latest addition is the introduction of an API set for Viva Engage. I’m extremely positive about this recent development, as it introduces support for interacting with Viva Engage (formerly known as Yammer) via Microsoft Graph; laying a solid foundation for future enhancements to this API set and allowing developers to benefit from all Microsoft Graph features, including authentication and throttling management. This blog posts introduces the new Viva Engage API in Microsoft Graph and related scenarios.
Anatomy of a Viva Engage community
Each Viva Engage community is linked to a Microsoft 365 group; however, the ID of the associated group isn’t the same as the ID of the related community. This close relationship enables developers to expand the management scenarios on a community by operating at group level. When changes are applied to the associated group, they automatically reflect in the related community. This allows for more extensive scenarios that go beyond the capabilities supported in the Viva Engage API. For more information on the Viva Engage and Microsoft 365 group relationship, see Viva Engage and Microsoft 365 groups.
The Viva Engage API in Microsoft Graph
The Viva Engage API in Microsoft Graph supports three scenarios that allow developers to:
- Create a community
- Monitor the creation of a community
- Access a community
Creating a community
Monitoring the creation of a community
Accessing a community
- group: Returns the Microsoft 365 group associated with the community. For example, https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/employeeExperience/communities/eyJfdHlwZSI6Ikdyb3VwIiwiaWQiOiI4MzIxMjc1In0/group
- owners: Returns the administrators of the community. For example, https://graph.microsoft.com/beta/employeeExperience/communities/eyJfdHlwZSI6Ikdyb3VwIiwiaWQiOiI4MzIxMjc1In0/owners
Integrating with Viva Engage communities via the Microsoft 365 group API
Adding and removing members from a community
Adding and removing an admin from a community
Renaming a community
Conclusion
- Microsoft Viva has been around since 2021. Initially, the extensibility options for Viva apps were limited but now Microsoft continues to expose more and more API sets that enable developers to integrate and extend the services of Viva apps such as Viva Learning, Viva Goals, and now Viva Engage.
- I spent part of my career managing and developing provisioning engines. It was awkward to use the Yammer REST API to create Yammer groups while the provision of teams and groups happened via the Microsoft Graph API. Independent software vendors (ISVs) provisioning Viva Engage communities can finally benefit from a unified approach for creating collaboration spaces and communities.