Connecting to SharePoint as a knowledge source for employee service AI agents (EAP)

For employee service (ES) AI agents, you can connect to SharePoint as a knowledge source. The connection supports role-based permission look-up for links, so users can search only the content they can access. You must be a Knowledge admin to create and manage knowledge connections.


What's my plan?







Employee Service Suite

Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus







Summary: ◀▼
You can connect SharePoint as a knowledge source for employee service AI agents to access sites, files, pages, and libraries based on user permissions. Supported content includes Word, PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, with indexing focused on text. The connection syncs updates every 15 minutes and supports role-based access, ensuring users see only content they have permission to view.






Location: Admin Center > AI > AI agents > Sources


For employee service (ES) AI agents, you can connect to SharePoint as a knowledge source. The
connection supports role-based permission look-up for links, so users can search only the
content they can access. You must be a Knowledge admin to create and manage knowledge
connections.
The connection allows these resource types to be surfaced in ES AI agents, according to the
applied permissions:
Sites
Files
Pages
Libraries


This article contains the following topics:

Understanding which
Sharepoint content can be indexed
Connecting to SharePoint for employee
service AI agents

Related article:
Creating, deploying and editing employee service AI agents
(EAP)




Understanding which SharePoint content can be indexed

Across SharePoint sites, files, pages and libraries, the following file types are
indexed:


Documents: Word documents, PDFs, Excel files, and PowerPoint presentations. While
the connection indexes documents containing images, it primarily focuses on the text
content within those documents.

Images: Metadata related to images stored in SharePoint, but image content is not
processed directly.

Videos: Metadata related to videos stored in SharePoint, but video content is not
processed directly.

Limitations apply to the following content:


Images in documents: While documents containing images are indexed, the focus is
on the text content, and there is no image recognition or analysis.

Video content: Direct video content analysis isn't supported, only metadata is
indexed.




Connecting to SharePoint for employee service AI agents

You can connect to SharePoint as a knowledge source for ES AI agents.
To connect to SharePoint as a knowledge source


In Admin Center, click
AI in the sidebar, then select AI agents > Sources.
Click Add source, then for SharePoint, click Connect.
Enter a unique connection name.
Select a user access type:

Restricted access: This connection enforces user permissions. This means
that when users ask questions, they see only information from the connected source
that they already have access to.

Open to everyone: This connection does not enforce user-level permissions
for the connected source. Any user with access to an ES AI agent using the
connection can see all content available through that connected source. If a user
clicks on a source, but doesn’t have permission, access is denied.

See Understanding knowledge source permissions in
employee service AI agents.

Click Next.
Log in to SharePoint, then follow the on-screen prompts to authorize the
connection.
Sign in with a Microsoft tenant user.
Approve access to Zendesk.
Choose a security mode:

Open to everyone: Users see all the resources accessible to the tenant user
you used to sign in.

Restricted access: Users see only documents they have permission to
access.


In the list of SharePoint sites, all sites are selected and included in the connection
by default, so deselect any sites, files, pages and libraries you want to exclude
from the connection, then click Next.
Select a data range, then click Done. The initial connection sync begins. It
might take some time to sync all content, depending on the volume. After the initial
sync, the integration captures file updates every 15 minutes.
At this point, you
can add the knowledge source to one or more AI agents by clicking Add to AI
agent. Or, you can wait to create and deploy an ES AI agent with this knowledge
source at a later time (see Creating, deploying and editing employee service AI agents
(EAP)).





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