When building Microsoft 365 applications, you need to correctly configure your Azure AD app registration to connect to Microsoft 365. The Integration assistant helps you to do it as quickly as possible.

The benefit of Microsoft 365 applications

Building applications for Microsoft 365 offers you many benefits. If you build them for your organization, they allow you to extend Microsoft 365 to your needs and integrate them with your business processes. If you are an ISV, by building Microsoft 365 applications, you can tap into a huge market of organizations of all types and sizes who are on Microsoft 365 and who look for adding additional capabilities to their platform.

Microsoft 365 offers developers a rich set of APIs to communicate with the different services in Microsoft 365. Whether you need to create resources or read information stored in Microsoft 365, you can use the Microsoft Graph. But there is one more thing you need to do before you can tap into this data.

The first hurdle

Like with any other secure API, before you can interact with it, you need to authenticate. On the Microsoft cloud, it translates to registering an application in Azure Active Directory and correctly configuring its settings. Often, developers struggled with finding the right set of settings for their apps. But it just got easier.

Easily configure your Azure AD application

Recently, Microsoft released a preview of the Integration assistant - new functionality integrated into Azure AD meant to help you configure your Azure AD application for your scenario. Rather than trying to guess what settings your app registration needs, the Integration assistant will tell you exactly what you need.

How it works

After registering your application in Azure AD, from the menu, open the Integration assistant.

From the list of different types of apps, select the type (or types) of applications that you're building.

In the end, select the Evaluate my app registration option to have the Integration assistant verify your configuration.

The Integration assistant will now check your app registration configuration and show you which options need configuring for the scenario that you've chosen.

If you need to change your configuration or want to update your Azure AD registration to support different scenarios, you can update the Integration assistant profile, using the Edit option.

Summary

The Integration assistant is a great step towards helping developers correctly configure their Azure AD app registrations when building Microsoft 365 applications. Using the Integration assistant, you can both check what configuration options you need for your newly built application as well as ensure that you don't expose any unnecessary settings that don't belong in your application.