Microsoft has announced to the developer world that it will replace its Working With API with the new People API.

The main difference presented is that their People API aggregates data about individuals extracted from different sources such as Email, contacts lists, and social media networks. Microsoft's People API processes ranking such as contacts presented based on relevance to the user.

Microsoft's decision to replace the Working With API with the People API is due to its capability to include complete and rich AD metadata from users, as only a small subset of such data was available through the Working With API. The ranking capability of the People API certainly increases its value.

The People API is part of the Microsoft Graph environment. If utilized in an application or process, users can call the "person resource type" and fetch details on a particular person. The data which could be possibly retrieved includes the person's birthday, the company of employment, the office's location, common online username, email address, the given or legal name, phone numbers, any unique identifier, and much more. This process is commonly known as data extraction.

Aside from the ability of the People API to rank people based on relevance, users can also browse for people with relevance to the result of a query made. Not only that, the People API's search function can be configured to automatically adjust misspelled names and even supports phonetic search. 

As the demise of the Working With API is imminent, those who are still using it or have applications based on it need to save all their data and information as all related documentation will be removed from the MS Graph sometime before the end of 2016.