Skip to main content

SharePoint & AlphaSense

Kristin Mize
Updated

Connect your SharePoint to automatically sync your notes and search for insights

With AlphaSense, you can set up a live one-way connection with your SharePoint account and apply AI-powered search to your notes.

Enterprise Intelligence Integrations Experience

With AlphaSense, you can set up a live one-way connection with your SharePoint account and apply AI-powered search to your notes.

Syncing Your Account

  1. Select Integrations on the bottom left-hand corner of the platform
  2. Select SharePoint

Connecting Your Account

  1. Click the "Connect App" button. Then follow the prompt to enter your SharePoint credentials and Grant Access to sync between SharePoint and AlphaSense.

  2. The Setup Wizard will walk you through the connection.

1.png

You'll choose between two connection types:

  • Admin Shared Connections: Best for organizational setups where centralized and consistent access control are essential. Shared Connections are managed by your IT Admins
  • Permission Mirroring: AlphaSense Admin Shared Connections mirror whatever permissions are set within your organization's SharePoint instance. This ensures that every search result or generative AI answer is returned only to the users allowed to access it.
  • Individual Connections: Best for personal use, providing flexibility and independent management of your integration. All content uploaded will be private to you by default, but you can manually share documents with groups saved in AlphaSense.

2.png

Selecting Content

  1. Select the Folders you want to sync.
  2. You also have the ability to select files that are not contained within folders.
  3. Select "Manage Tickers & Tags" to easily bulk select and tag your content prior to syncing. This helps streamline the process of sharing materials for individual connections.
  4. Select the sharing permissions for each folder

3.png

Reviewing Content

  1. Review your choices and click "Sync."

Disconnecting Your Account

  1. Go to "Manage > Disconnect."
  2. If you want to keep the content that was synced to AlphaSense, ensure the "Yes, make a copy of my account's current folders to keep on AlphaSense" checkbox is ticked.
  3. To finalize the disconnection, click "Ok Disconnect.

4.png

Upload Actions

Metadata Customization:

  • Users can add or remove Tags & Tickers as metadata at the folder level during the ingestion process, offering flexibility in how content is categorized and retrieved.

Folder Synchronization:

  • Users can synchronize entire folders, including all contained documents. Synchronization is exclusively folder-based, with direct file selection not available.

Data Syncing Process

AlphaSense performs an automatic sync with Sharepoint to keep your files up-to-date. The system runs periodic syncs approximately every 15 minutes to ensure that newly added files or recent changes to existing files are captured.

How Sync Works:

  • Data Change: Any changes made in Sharepoint (such as adding or updating files) will automatically be reflected in AlphaSense during the next scheduled sync.
  • Permissions Change: If permissions are modified in Sharepoint, these changes will be applied once a day with a separate re-crawl sync process.

Items to Note

Automated Sync for Existing Folders

  • Folders and sites that have been synced will automatically undergo periodic synchronization to ensure the content remains current.

Manual Addition for New Folders

  • To synchronize new folders and sites from SharePoint, users must manually add them, initiating the synchronization process.
  • File Size Limitation
    There is a maximum size limit of 100 MB for individual files, ensuring efficient data management and transfer.
  • Supported File Types
    SharePoint integration supports specific document extensions, including .pdf, .html, .htm, .txt, .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx, .msg, .eml, .csv, .xlsb, .xlsm, .one, .tsv, and .ods, catering to a broad range of content types.

Account Sync Exclusivity

  • To ensure data integrity, each SharePoint account can be synchronized with only one AlphaSense account at a time, prohibiting simultaneous user connections.
  • These requirements are designed to optimize the integration process between SharePoint and AlphaSense, enhancing document management, content accessibility, and collaboration capabilities within the platform.

Data Capture

  • AlphaSense will collect data from Sharepoint to generate faster results and insights. Supported file types include:
  • Sites, Folders, Documents
    • Documents: Word files, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations.
    • Metadata: folder paths

View Access

  • View permissions in SharePoint only support Azure AD groups for permission mapping and do not work with legacy SharePoint Site Groups.

Monitoring Added Documents

AlphaSense integration monitoring tracks the progress and details of integrations in real time to ensure everything is on course for optimal ingestion. Click into Monitoring to get a central view of documents details and status.

5.png

Reconciling Added Documents

AlphaSense integration reporting equips you with the tools for better understanding, management and optimization of your uploads. Click into Reports to get an audit of all content added with the ability to download a report.

6.png

To manage your added documents:

AlphaSense integration configuration page allows for management of user permissions, folder hierarchies and labeling. Click into Configuration to make any necessary changes.

7.png

Searching Across Content

The documents you add are processed through our AI algorithms and are made available almost immediately in platform. AlphaSense’s AI will automatically tag your documents and you will be able to search across internal content and apply AlphaSense’s AI search & discovery tools to a discrete set of documents for project-based work.

8.png

To quickly search across all of your internal content:

  1. Click the Company Integrations dropdown in the vertical filters

To search across uploaded documents only:

  1. Hover over SharePoint, then click Only

Click here to review our data security, data architecture, software, and more.

SharePoint Connections FAQ's

What is a SharePoint Individual Connection?

  • An Individual Connection allows you to sync Sites and Documents owned or accessible to you on Sharepoint. This connection is best suited for your personal use or when you want to control permissioning and sharing inside of Alphasense. This is suitable for clients who are testing AlphaSense within a defined user group, as well as for client content that is widely permissioned across their entire organization.

What is a SharePoint Workspace Connection?

  • A Workspace Connection provides a centralized and consistent way for an organization to sync SharePoint content. This setup is managed and configured by IT administrators, ensuring controlled access and permissioning across the organization’s content.

How is content sharing managed in AlphaSense?

  • AlphaSense offers flexible content sharing options based on the type of connection you use—Individual Connection or Workspace Connection.

Sharepoint Individual Connection

With an Individual Connection, you have full control over how your synced content is shared within AlphaSense. Once the connection is established, you can choose to keep your content private or share it with others, based on the sharing settings you configure during folder sync setup.

AlphaSense offers four sharing preferences:

  • Private: Content is only accessible to you and remains hidden from other team members.
  • Select Individuals: You can explicitly choose which team members have access to your synced content.
  • Select Group: You can create groups in AlphaSense, add relevant team members, and configure content to be shared with those groups.
  • Default Setting: You can set any of the above options as your default, ensuring that all incoming content is automatically shared according to your preferred configuration.

SharePoint WorkSpace Connection

With a Workspace Connection, permissions mirroring is enforced. This means AlphaSense automatically mirrors the access permissions from your SharePoint instance. Users will only see sites and documents they are authorized to access in SharePoint, ensuring secure and controlled content visibility.

Sharing permissions cannot be changed within AlphaSense for Workspace Connections, as they are entirely managed through SharePoint by your IT administrators.

Does AlphaSense support SharePoint Shared Connections?

  • No, AlphaSense only supports Individual and Workspace connections for individual users and IT Admin respectively. To leverage mapping of permissions while syncing content , users can leverage a Workspace Connection, which ensures centralized access and permission mapping.

Can I sync all my SharePoint site content to AlphaSense?

  • No, AlphaSense only supports syncing content from the document library for individual and workspace connections. Other site content, such as pages, conversations, site level notebooks, and site content are currently not supported for any SharePoint connection.

Can I sync my SharePoint Notebooks to AlphaSense?

  • Direct sync of SharePoint Onenote Notebooks to AlphaSense is not currently supported. However, we plan to add support for Notebooks via sharepoint asset library in the near future. In the meantime, if you have an individual SharePoint connection, you can move your Notebooks to any document library, allowing them to successfully sync with AlphaSense.

What happens to my content when I disconnect my SharePoint connection?

  • Disconnecting your sharepoint connection will trigger the deletion of all content synced through it in AlphaSense. When disconnecting, you are presented with the option to to retain inside Alphasense if desired.

To keep your content in AlphaSense while disconnecting the connection, simply check the retention checkbox (as shown below). If you choose this option, your content will remain available in search but will no longer appear under Monitoring or Reports in the Integration Center.

9.png

Why am I being asked to re-authenticate?

As outlined by Microsoft, there are several reasons why the SharePoint token used to establish the connection expires, halting any further content synchronization. To restore syncing, users must re-authenticate their account.

  1. Simply click on the reconnecting app, which will launch the authentication workflow.
  2. Make sure to select the same account used during the initial connection setup—otherwise, authentication will fail.

NOTE: token expiration only affects future syncs. Any content that was previously synced remains accessible within AlphaSense.

10.png

Related articles

Comments

0 comments

Article is closed for comments.