O365 Connector

The initiating companies Finalist (https://www.finalist.nl), SIM Group (https://www.simgroep.nl/) and Open Social (https://www.getopensocial.com/) have built a large number of intranets, portals and other tools to help people connect, with the firm belief that it should be easier to work together with the use of such tools. It is always about making good use of the advantages of each individual application and making them work together. Drupal and a distribution like Open Social has the power to socially connect people. O365 has the indispensable tooling to collaborate in your working environment. Combining the two gives the 1 + 1 = 3 effect.

This idea was born out of a desire to enrich organization information within a Drupal environment using the data available in Microsoft Office 365. See your latest emails in a side-block? See your colleague’s status (free, busy or away) or his or her Drupal user avatar. And even call your colleague using Teams or send them a Teams message from within Drupal…

In close cooperation development was taken to the next level. This resulted in the first version of the O365 connector which subsequently was given back to the community. Development will continue and we are looking forward to others using the module and their feedback!

Right now the O365 Connector module gives you all this functionality:

·       Outlook calendar & mail
Submodules provide you with several blocks and pages that list latest unread mails, upcoming appointments and Sharepoint files. We also added the possibility to add nodes to your Outlook calendar. This means you can add your own appointments to your calendar from within Drupal.

·       Contacts
Simple but very essential. User profiles, your colleagues, are derived from Active Directory. You can search them, and you can enrich profiles with useful content and find colleagues based on this content and/or their activity.

·       Onedrive / Sharepoint
See your latest files, or the latest files shared with you. Refer to and work directly in the files with O365 tools

·       Groups and Teams
You can create groups in Drupal and connect Teams groups to those Drupal groups. You can see the Teams status of your contacts and quickly send and receive team chats from within Drupal!

·       Single Sign On
Log in to Drupal via SSO and magically you are logged in to all applications that make use of that login, all your o365 content is shown… it’s that easy!

·       Sharepoint search: file search and search field
Search your Sharepoint from within Drupal and access your files using the o365 applications. Also: generate links to your Sharepoint files.

Read more:

Introducing the Office365 connector | Finalist blog

Extending the Office 365 Connector module | Finalist blog

Case goals and results:

From intranet to digital workspace: community, working together and sharing knowledge benefiting from the best Drupal has to offer as well as O365, which has, more-or-less, become a fact of life.

The main goal of this project is to unlock information and bring it to the user in a Drupal environment. It is important to know that the goal is not to rebuild Outlook or Teams in a Drupal environment.

For example: the user will see his or her latest emails within Drupal. If the user then wants to reply to an email, the user is taken to Outlook to do so. Another example is making a Teams call: the user can see who is online within Drupal and is able from there to make the call using Teams.

Adding O365 functions from Sharepoint, Outlook, Teams, etc. to a Drupal-based intranet or workspace has given extra value and meaning to the personalized context of the logged-in user.

Especially the possibility to present information, documentation, etc. open and transparent on the intranet for each user or employee makes that a user can find more easily the social and business talk and information about projects which has a larger impact than your own work.

This shows the strength of Drupal in integration, personalization, collaboration, and community.

Challenges:

Challenges for this module can be divided in a few points.

·       Because we are connecting with Office 365 and we have access to personal data (like emails, documents, etc) security is very important. The module utilizes the “External Authentication” module to login users and connects to the Microsoft Graph API using oAuth2. Refresh tokens etc. are saved in the user’s private temp store and data retrieved from the Graph API is uncached so data is not leaked to other users. Especially the authentication to documents is a main issue at local governments. The CISO of different customers are looking with us to this implementation. Issues will be noticed very soon. To secure the governance of this MS365 extension with its modules we create a governance agreement between Open Social and SIM and between Finalist and SIM so we can guarantee issues will be solved.

·       The module is basically a “starter kit” for other developers to connect to the Graph API. To make this possible we had to create and implement a custom service to get and send data to the Graph API in a normalized way. This service uses the private temp store for the authentication values and so is aware of the user that is doing the request.