In today's fast-paced digital workspace, Microsoft Teams has become an indispensable tool for collaboration, with 300 million daily active users worldwide as of 2023, according to Statista. As organizations grow and evolve, managing team memberships efficiently is crucial for developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) building solutions that integrate with and extend Microsoft Teams. To streamline this process, Microsoft has introduced a new beta Microsoft Graph API that allows for the bulk removal of team members in a single API call.

In this blog post, I introduce this new API, highlighting its benefits and explaining how it works.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is a communication and collaboration platform that provides chat, video, meetings, file storage (via SharePoint), and integrations to applications, including other Microsoft 365 services like Viva Connections. It’s designed for structured collaboration through teams and channels, enabling conversations around projects, daily tasks, and so on; all in one place. Microsoft Teams also offers extensibility options for developers and ISVs to create integrations, such as tabs, bots, or message extensions, which enhance the user experience.

The value of the new bulk removal API

Previously, removing multiple members from a team required individual API calls for each member. For instance, removing 20 members meant 20 separate API calls, resulting in potential throttling issues and increased complexity in code management. The new conversationMember: remove API changes the game by allowing developers to remove multiple members in a single request.

Benefits for developers and ISVs

  • Efficiency: Reduce the number of API calls, resulting in faster times and lower chances of hitting rate limits.
  • Simplified codebase: Streamline your code by handling bulk operations, making it cleaner and easier to maintain.
  • Performance: Improve the performance of your applications by reducing the number of requests.
  • Scalability: Better handle large teams and membership changes without worrying about throttling issues.

Bulk removing team members

The new conversationMember: remove API mirrors the existing conversationMember: add API that allows you to add multiple members in a single request to a team. Developers can now send a single request with a list of team members (using either the user principal name or the user’s ID) to be removed, and Microsoft Graph will process the removal in one operation.

Conclusion

The introduction of the bulk removal API is another significant step forward in team management within Microsoft Teams. It offers developers and ISVs a more efficient and scalable way to manage team memberships. Consider leveraging this API in your applications to improve performance and provide a better user experience. I look forward to seeing this API reach general availability, providing developers and ISVs with a production-ready option.

For those interested in other enhancements to Microsoft Graph APIs, check out my previous blog post: Three New Reporting APIs for Copilot Now Available in Microsoft Graph.

Thanks for reading,
Jarbas

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