Using Office 365 Connectors for Groups in ASP.NET MVC

At Connect(); 2015, a new feature for Office 365 Groups called custom connectors was launched. With custom connectors, a new conversation can be started within an Office 365 Group programmatically, from your own custom application.

A very handy guide to custom connectors is available on the Outlook Dev Center: Office 365 Connectors for Groups (Developer Preview)

In this post, lets have a very simple look at how to use a custom connector from your ASP.NET MVC application.

The sample code for this post is available here: https://github.com/vman/Office365GroupsConnector

Before we get started, it is recommended to have SSL configured for your ASP.NET MVC application:
Configuring an ASP.NET project for development with SSL

1) The Connect to Office 365 button:

The way the connect to Office 365 button works is really simple, all it does is to redirect the user to the connectors page for Outlook and then after authentication, redirects the user back to a specified callback page. Here is the html for the button

And the description for each query string parameter from the Outlook Dev Center page:

Parameter	Details
state	You can use the state parameter to save your application state. If you supply a value for state it is returned back to the specified callback_url when the application returns. This is an optional parameter.
app_name	Provide your application name. This name will show up in the authorization popup and in the connector list page that your users would see. The app_name is a mandatory parameter and can range from 1 to 100 characters.
app_logo_url	Provide the URL to your application logo. Ensure that the link is not behind an authentication wall and is publicly reachable. Use a logo of size under 10KB (preferably 256x256px) and type JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BPM, X-ICON or SVG+XML. The app_logo_url is a mandatory parameter.
callback_url	The callback URL should be a valid HTTPS URL without any query parameters. When the application returns successfully, the state passed, name and webhook URL of the selected group are returned as query parameters to the callback_url. If the application encounters a failure the state passed and the error code are returned to the callback_url.

This is how the button is rendered on your custom page:

2) Authentication:

When you click on the button, you are taken to the Office 365 Sign-in page if you are not already signed in. Next, you get a list of Office 365 Groups which you are a member of. You have to select a group in which the message will be posted, and click on Allow:

3) The Code:

The next step is to actually post the Office 365 Group card. Behind the scenes, I have used RestSharp in an MVC controller to make the post:

4) Navigate to the Office 365 Group:

And if you now navigate to the Office 365 Group in Outlook, you will see 2 new messages, the first one is when the connection to the custom application is set:

And the next one is the actual message we posted from the MVC controller:

Thanks for reading!

Get all documents from an Office 365 Group with REST

In my previous post, we saw how you can get a list of all the groups in your Office 365 portal with the REST API. Now, if you are building a solution on top of the Office 365 platform and want a list of all the documents in a particular Office 365 Group, you can get them using the REST API.

As discussed in my previous post, each group is underpinned by a separate site collection in SharePoint Online. When you upload a document to a group, it gets uploaded in the "Documents" library of the root web of that site collection. So you can use the REST API to get all sorts of information about the group including the list of documents. 

Here is a test group called "Technical Team" I have created in Office 365 for the purpose of this post. I have also uploaded 2 documents to it:

In order to get the list of documents in the group, we need to make a REST call to the SharePoint Search REST API:

_api/search/query?querytext='SiteTitle:"Technical Team" AND ContentTypeId:0x0101007DB6FD427B6228409ED888DF766B27C9'&selectproperties='Title,Path,SiteTitle'

The ContentTypeId is the id of the content type which is associated to the document when a document is uploaded to an Office 365 group.

Here is the complete code. I have used JavaScript and the jQuery.ajax function to make calls to the SharePoint REST API. But you can use a variety of other options like the JSOM, CSOM or even the Office 365 APIs. Since all the groups are by default open to users in the tenant, there should not be major challenges to authentication around this. I haven't tested the code for these APIs myself. 

And the logs in my Dev tools console:

Thanks for reading!

Get all Office 365 Video Channels, Groups and Delve Boards with REST

Office 365 has introduced 3 new portals recently: Videos, Groups and Delve. Behind the scenes, the architecture of Videos and Groups is such that each Video channel is a site collection and so is each Group. For Delve boards, each board is saved as a Tag and when you add a document to a board, the document is tagged with the name of the board.

If you are working on a solution for Office 365 and want to integrate Videos, Groups or Delve, here is how you can get a list of all of them using the SharePoint REST API:

1) Get all Office 365 Video Channels with REST API:

https://siteurl.sharepoint.com/_api/search/query?querytext='contentclass:sts_site WebTemplate:POINTPUBLISHINGTOPIC'&SelectProperties='WebTemplate,Title,Path'&rowlimit=50

2) Get all Office 365 Groups with REST API:

https://siteurl.sharepoint.com/_api/search/query?querytext='contentclass:sts_site WebTemplate:Group'&SelectProperties='WebTemplate,Title,Path'&rowlimit=50

3) Get all Delve Boards with REST API:

https://siteurl.sharepoint.com/_api/search/query?querytext='(Path:"TAG://PUBLIC/?NAME=*")'&Properties='IncludeExternalContent:true'&selectproperties='Path,Title'&rowlimit=50