grommunio Next Brings Microsoft Graph

The grommunio developers still aren't done. Their roadmap is ambitious, with plans for the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) and Microsoft Graph, for which the team is already delivering tech previews.

Grommunio Next [9] is the first open source Graph API web application to provide all the familiar productivity features you need (Figure 8). It is the future main web application for access to your mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, and more.

Figure 8: Grommunio is the first open source project to implement Microsoft's future API, Microsoft Graph. On the roadmap, and already available as a Tech preview, you can see the Graph-enabled groupware client connected to grommunio Next.

For those of you who haven't heard of Microsoft Graph yet, it's a unified API platform [10] that connects various Microsoft 365 services, providing a seamless way to access and manage data across tools such as Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Office (Microsoft 365), OneDrive, and more. With Microsoft Graph, developers can build applications that interact with user data and organizational resources, such as email, files, calendars, and user profiles.

The Graph API offers a single endpoint which streamlines access to information from the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem, removing the need to work with multiple separate APIs.

Graph is kind of a meta-API that allows you to address single fields in an Excel document for read and write with a simple API command. Naturally, such a behemoth of an API is very complex and takes a great deal of time to design and develop. The importance of this task, says Microsoft, lies in Graph's ability to integrate a wide range of data and services, offering organizations a holistic view of their operations.

Real-Time Data

By allowing access to data in real time, Microsoft Graph enables applications to automate workflows, enhance collaboration, and improve productivity. For example, an application can pull calendar information to schedule meetings, manage cloud storage by interacting with OneDrive, or monitor organizational insights. It supports enterprise needs for security and compliance, because developers can access data while maintaining the same governance and control policies applied within Microsoft 365 and can help enable AI and automation.

Many analysts see Graph as the future back end for all Microsoft applications, so it's no surprise that many companies are working to integrate it into their products. Grommunio is the first groupware vendor to do so. A tech preview of grommunio Next [11] is already available for testing, and it shows a webmail and groupware client for the browser that is connected to the grommunio server by Microsoft Graph. Again, grommunio's implementation of Graph is the first open source implementation for groupware.

AI and More

Another big topic the grommunio developers are addressing is AI, but on a reasonable scale. The integrated AI tools rather focus on helping the user than on creating hallucinated content. Grommunio Antispam 3.9.0 (released in July 2024) includes GPT-based spam detection, and upcoming are AI-based assistants for email summary generation (available 2024Q4) and for functions such as autotasking in grommunio Web (2025Q1).