monday.com accesses rich data, connects workflows, and generates valuable insights in its Work OS platform using Microsoft Graph

So monday.com developed Work OS, an environment for organizations of any size to create the tools and processes employees need to manage every aspect of their work. By combining building blocks like apps, automations, and integrations, teams have complete control over building and customizing their workflows. Small, medium-sized, and enterprise customers are using scalable solutions from monday.com to create continuity and flow among those familiar apps and services that their workers are already using. Cross functional boards and workspaces provide increased interoperability, better workflow automations, and help coordinate organization-wide effort that increases return on investments in IT infrastructure while boosting productivity and worker satisfaction.

Unleashing productivity with Microsoft Graph

For many of monday.com’s customers that use Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph is a key technology. Microsoft Graph provides an API into the organization’s cloud-based productivity data.

Through this single, highly secure endpoint into the Microsoft 365 platform and features, monday.com can access rich, actionable organizational data from a wide variety of sources. Internal sources such as user identity management, communications and collaboration features, device management, business applications and services, and security events can be combined with external sources through Microsoft Search. Data on people, chats, meetings, files, teams, and statuses from across the organization can be sorted, sliced, and diced to extract value and create new insights. At monday.com, developers build connections and associations within that data and bring those insights into the Work OS platform, providing a boost to productivity with powerful and customizable data-driven workflows.

One such developer is Shanee Radzewsky, Full Stack Developer at monday.com. She describes the interface to Outlook and Microsoft Teams as particularly powerful. “Using the Microsoft Graph API, I can trigger sending emails or have incoming messages kick off a workflow. This can include creating an item on a board, generating updates, connecting related activities, and generally empowering the workflow. Outlook is one of our most used and most popular integrations,” she says, adding, “We also have an embedded view within Teams where people can work in Teams without ever having to leave, viewing our virtual work boards as tabs, exchanging information and receiving notifications and updates through our bot participants. With the Microsoft Graph API, I can embed our features into Teams in a very comfortable, usable way.”

Working with the Microsoft Graph API

Microsoft supports developers, which is brought to bear here, too. Radzewsky points out specific benefits of being part of the Microsoft independent software vendor (ISV) community, which helps her team work with the Microsoft Graph API in their development projects. “Since it’s a Microsoft environment, there’s very extensive Microsoft Graph API documentation, which is always something I find reassuring. And because the Microsoft Graph API is a very popular tool, there’s also a lot of support in the developer community, which is a great benefit,” she says. There are also developer tools to help prototype new features and set up proof of concept testing with Microsoft Graph. Radzewsky says, “Microsoft Graph Explorer is very useful for testing different queries, trying out potential workflows, and debugging new features.”

There’s also a growing network of monday.com partners interacting with the Microsoft cloud ecosystem through the Microsoft Graph API. Papernaya says, “Because we see a big overlap of customers with the Microsoft environment, we clearly see extensive use of the Microsoft Graph API in the future either by us, by our customers doing their own customizations and extensions, or by our partners that will all be able to build solutions and applications on top of monday.com using the Microsoft Graph API.” Radzewsky adds that this helps broaden opportunities for simple connectivity and extensibility through the monday.com environment. “If you have a company that already has their workflows set up and they’re already using the Microsoft Graph API, then they can now create an app that will exchange updates with monday.com, using Microsoft Graph as a common hub for interactions with the existing environment. Microsoft Graph connects the two together, making it easy to onboard our solution for immediate advantages,” she says.

Accessible, powerful solutions for a broad range of use cases

The fundamental advantage provided by monday.com is that it gives teams and departments the dedicated tools and processes they need for their specific requirements. The solutions are end-to-end, industry-tailored products that provide teams the robust infrastructure to work more efficiently both in their immediate team and across the broader organization. Because solutions connect seamlessly with monday.com Work OS, each pre-packaged solution plugs into the larger work ecosystem, allowing cross-team collaboration to extend to every facet of the company. Radzewsky notes that using the Microsoft Graph API has brought immediate benefits to the dedicated solutions around core communications, collaboration, and the automation of related workflows. “The tools that we see being used most often are the ones that are used across all those fields. So the email and the communications notification interoperability with Microsoft Teams is really heavily used—and used by most of our customers.”

And for those customers, many of the configuration and customization options don’t require the intervention of administrators, consultants, or in-house developers. For many users, it’s easy to build custom processes and procedures to suit their project or their preferred way of working without any code, scripting processes much as they might add rules for their email. “Using the platform’s no-code capabilities, customers from every industry can adapt each building block to build software applications and tools that fit their desired use case and evolving needs,” says Papernaya.

Highly secure solutions for the hybrid workplace

With increased communication and the drive toward enhanced collaboration comes a corresponding need expressed by monday.com customers that solutions meet their security and compliance requirements. Security is particularly front of mind now that most workplaces have moved toward more remote work practices and hybrid workplaces, offering a mix of in-office and at-home options that are likely the future norm. The Microsoft 365 environment is designed from the ground up with security in mind, and Microsoft Graph offers a security API to hook into that environment, along with multiple security providers, through a single programmatic interface. Papernaya makes the point that solutions can provide security without compromising accessibility or that low-friction, work-anywhere user experience, using Microsoft Graph. “With single sign-on, users can more securely sign in to monday.com with their Azure-authenticated user credentials. And we support the use of System for Cross-Domain Identity Management, or SCIM, for the highly secure provisioning and management of users and devices,” she says, adding, “It’s very powerful to be able to synchronize monday.com and Azure environments through Microsoft Graph and have users, wherever they work, access the information they need, on the devices they choose, while remaining highly secure.”

Future opportunities

There are plenty of opportunities for further incorporation of Microsoft 365 and Azure features by means of the Microsoft Graph API, and monday.com has a number of new developments on the radar. Papernaya notes that customers are interested in adding DevOps features to help add engineering project management to their monday.com deployments, helping bring otherwise isolated research and development and engineering teams to engage more readily with the broader organization. “This is very much in line with our overall goal to break silos and connect different departments within the customer’s company,” she says. “This interoperability will allow nontechnical people to understand what’s happening in engineering. It also enables all that information to be ingested into the monday.com environment, where it can make a significant contribution to the organization’s knowledge base. And the engineering team gains quick and easy access to understand what the requests are and what the feedback coming from the other teams is, without introducing additional overhead. They’ll like that!”

Working closely with Microsoft as an ISV has been a particularly positive experience for monday.com, and Papernaya says she looks forward to continued work with Microsoft from both a technical and a business perspective. “The relationship with Microsoft is something that really gives a lot of value to us as a company. And I think a big benefit is how extensive the Microsoft ecosystem is. We have shared technology, shared goals, and shared customers, and because of that overlap, we see a bright future for our platform and for our business opportunities provided by Microsoft Graph.”

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