Rulex Platform allows you to access the content of a Microsoft Outlook
account by connecting to Microsoft Graph APIs. This means that
you can import the attachments of an Outlook email directly into Rulex
Platform, and this allows you to save up time and streamline your working
process.
Just follow these simple steps to register your Microsoft Graph APIs and
connect MS Outlook to Rulex Platform:
Prerequisites
To call Microsoft Graph, an Azure application must obtain an access token
from the Microsoft identity platform.
This access token includes information about whether the app is authorized
to access Microsoft Graph on behalf of a signed-in user or with its own
identity or not. Since the access token validity is short-lived, the identity
platform gives also a refresh token, which can be later used to get a new
access token without manual intervention.
For security reasons, Rulex Platform allows logging in to Outlook on behalf
of a user, meaning that a user should sign in to the program and personally
grant access to their data. This is also known as delegate access.
In order to call Microsoft Graph APIs, an Azure application needs to be
created and registered with the Microsoft identity platform.
Procedure
Open the Office 365 Admin Center
using the account of a user member of the Tenant Global Admins group.
Click on the Azure Active Directory
(soon to be renamed into Microsoft Entra ID) link that is
available under the Admin centers group in the left-side tree
view of the Office 365 Admin Center. In the new browser tab
that will be opened, you will find the Microsoft Azure portal.
Select the Azure Active Directory
section n the newly opened portal, and choose the option App
registrations.
In the App registrations tab,
you will find the list of Azure AD applications registered in your tenant.
Click the New registration button in the upper left part of
the blade.
Provide a name for your application and click on
Register at the bottom of the blade. Now that the application
is registered, it then has to grant the API permissions related to Outlook.
Since Rulex Platform supports delegated access,
only delegated permissions will be allowed. In particular, the necessary
permissions, also called scopes, are:
User.Read - Sign in and read
user profile.
Mail.Read - Read user mail.
Mail.ReadWrite - Read and write
access to user mail (useful only for export connections).
Mail.Send - Send mail as a user
(useful only for export connections).
Parameters to interact with Rulex Platform
As the application is registered and ready to interact with Rulex Platform,
to configure the Outlook panel in Rulex Platform specify the following
parameters:
Username:
the mail address whose messages need to be read.
Client
ID: the ID specific to the application (also known as application ID).
Authentication:
the authentication type. Possible values are:
Interactive: users have to manually
enter their mail address and password in a popup window. These credentials are
used to automatically get a new pair of access token and refresh token.
Refresh Token: users enter a valid
refresh token to get a new access token.
Tenant
ID: the tenant ID of the users’ Azure subscription.
If the chosen authentication type is Interactive, it will be
possible to save the refresh token for later use as a secret in an Rulex
Platform vault.
Save
Refresh Token in vault: a Rulex
Platform vault resource.
Secret
Name: the name of the secret that will contain the new refresh token.
Use then a vault
variable to retrieve it and to use it for example later in a Refresh
Token authentication connection type.
Web Application Programming Interfaces (aka web APIs) are among developer must-haves, enabling
the fast integration of different software applications, the automation of
repetitive tasks, and increasing scalability to access and process large amounts of data.
But modern web APIs are often considered to be too complex to set up and use,
and reserved only for expert software programmers.
My job in Rulex is to make technical concepts accessible to all users, including web API documentation, so I had
a chat with one of Rulex’s API developers, @Luca Paganin, to gain some down-to-earth shareable insight into
when and how APIs are used in Rulex, and how they can help businesses.
Let's start with the basics: what do web APIs offer to enterprises from a business perspective?
First things first, with web APIs you can perform operations without opening the user
interface. This might not seem particularly mind-blowing, but it brings many important advantages,
especially for large companies, which need to perform many daily operations on a lot of data.
Among these benefits, two of them play a key role:
Automation: you can trigger operations to run without human intervention, which can
really speed things up.
Scalability: you can schedule operations to run at any time of day or night, which is
particularly important in multinational companies that cross multiple time zones.
These two important characteristics are strictly related: automation leads to scalability, so
once the automation is set, there is no need for a physical user to launch computations on scheduled days and
times.
Can you give me some real-life examples?
Some of our largest customers are multinational giants working on huge amounts of data. They need to automate
all their processes to run frequently, so they can handle multiple operations to optimize the
business process.
But let me give you a specific example of a smaller client.
This client had to run a business process every 8 hours to guarantee a service to their
clients, bank holidays and weekends included. Initially, it was the only process they had to manage. But as the
company grew, the number of services and processes increased, each one with a slightly different scheduling
frequency - some ran only during weekends, others once a month.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to deal with them all 24/7 (including holidays), and the company was
spending more and more in overtime. They implemented web APIs to run these processes for them
and drastically lowered the stress levels of many of their employees!
What type of APIs are used in Rulex Platform?
There are lots of different kinds of APIs, such as Webhooks, SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), and RPC
(Remote Procedure Calls), but in Rulex we use REST APIs because they’re simple,
lightweight, and easy to integrate. They’re also the most widely used APIs.
Our REST APIs are used to send API requests to Rulex Platform to either perform operations or
retrieve information. These operations are generally grouped into a rather unfortunately named
collection of operations, called CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete).
These CRUD operations are performed on Rulex Platform resources, which may be environments, file sources, flows,
vaults, etc. For example, you can schedule the computation of a flow, which automatically returns
updated client data via e-mail to business users.
This sort of automation is very important when optimizing processes, as business experts can align
strategy with constantly updated results, without opening the software interface or even needing to
know how to use it.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about web APIs?
Well, there is an extremely important aspect we haven’t really touched on.
Web APIs enable developers to open a gateway to other software applications, which is an
enormous starting hurdle for so many organizations with many different software tools, which have to somehow
interact and exchange data.
Rulex Platform is really agile with data. We can collect and blend data from any source,
perform any analysis and optimization operations our clients need, and export the results as and how they
prefer. Web APIs break down all data barriers, making this possible wherever the data is
stored!
That’s what I love about my job: developing APIs that enable our clients to integrate Rulex Platform into
their current systems. After the project is fully developed, it is rewarding to see how the
implementation of APIs has had such a positive impact on businesses.
Rulex Platform APIs are available in the Factory Enterprise license.
To find out more about the available licenses and pricing, check out the Pricing page.