There were disparate APIs to access files in SharePoint, users in Azure Active Directory, mailing contacts and calendar in Exchange and so on. As the number of Microsoft products evolved over years there are number of places where information of a particular user is stored like in Active Directory, SharePoint, Mail Servers, and File Servers and so on. There is a new Office 365 unified API that was launched recently. The API endpoint is the central location for connecting to all of the Office 365 APIs, including the Office Graph preview APIs removing the need to go to independent silos. It allows developers a more streamlined way of accessing all Office 365 data and relationships, including,

  • Users
  • Groups
  • Files
  • Mail
  • Calendar
  • Contacts
  • Office Graph
The unified API explorer is available here.

Hands on Labs with the unified API are available here.

This new unified API single endpoint will help in more users centric experiences where the data that a user gets to see is related to his/her activities irrespective of the MS product that it is performed on. It is a RESTful API and supports OData query options.You can use the data relationships and create some new applications around it.