About the SharePoint Online Connector

BA Insight’s new SharePoint Online v2.0 connector is an updated version of the SharePoint O365 connector (v1).

See below for specific updates and improvements.

Features

Our latest SharePoint Online connector:

• Enables you to connect to SharePoint Online, fetch data from any site, document library, or list; and index this content securely.
• Provides both full and incremental crawls Scanning and capturing only new data from all of your content sources. This data did not exist when the last crawl was run. so the users have the latest information available to them all the time.

For more information about SharePoint Online connector features and abilities see https://www.bainsight.com/connectors/sharepoint-online-connector/.

Platform Support

The following search engines are supported:

• Amazon Elasticsearch
• Azure Cognitive Search
• Elasticsearch
• SharePoint Online/Microsoft Search
• SharePoint On-Premise
• Solr

Security

The SharePoint Online Connector honors the security of the source application.

Limitations

Note the following limitations with the SharePoint Online connector:

• Content crawled with BA Insight SharePoint Online O365 connector must be recrawled after upgrading to version 2 of the connector.
• Due to an SPO API limitation, if a new folder is added to the SPO document library, an incremental crawl will recrawl all items.

• When upgrading from version 1 to version 2 of the connector, you must perform a completely remove version 1 and perform a fresh install of version 2.
  Note: Version 2 of the connector can be installed alongside version 1 and used to crawl items before version 1 of the connector is removed from your environment.
• If a user or group permission is removed from an item, the connector has no way of determining the changes or recrawling those specific items.
• If an incremental crawl is performed after an item in a SharePoint folder has been moved to another folder, that item will display twice in the crawl results (once in the new folder location, and once in the original folder location).

What's New

See the Release Notes for a full list of changes to the Connector.

v2.1

Azure Active Directory user synchronization enhancements

• The SharePoint Online connector will now only synchronize specified users from Azure Active Directory An identity and access management solution from Microsoft that helps organizations secure and manage identities for hybrid and multicloud environments. that are included in groups from the SharePoint site as configured in the connection Connection defines the how Connectivity Hub connects to your Source System (which contains your documents, graphics, etc.,). Your Connection includes identifying elements such as: URL of the BA Insight web service connector you are using, (File Share connector, SharePoint Online connector, etc.), Authentication mode, User Accounts and Credentials, Database information (for database connectors). Previously, The SharePoint connector would load all users from Azure Active Directory A directory service for Windows domain networks. A hierarchical structure that stores information about objects on the network. Used to manage permissions and control access to critical network resources. regardless of their usage.

Support Certificate-Based Authentication Without Local Admin Rights

• When configuring the SharePoint Online connector using App Registration with Certificate Authentication, users previously needed Local Administrator rights to install the certificate into the Local Machine Trusted Root store (LocalMachine\Root). The connector has been enhanced to allow use of certificates installed in the Current User Personal Store (CurrentUser\My), removing the Local Administrator requirement.

• For more information, see Certificate-based authentication for SharePoint Online Connectors.

Security Sync improvements

• Security Sync Loads User and Group tables and executes the mapping based on the connector configuration. tasks have been enhanced to improve performance and efficiency.

Web.config enhancements

The following web.config settings have been added:

• You can now override your tenant name by specifying a vanity link for your SharePoint Online connector configuration with the "TenantName" setting.

• You can now enable or disable memory caching for security syncs for unified members, role members, and SharePoint members with the following settings:

  • "EnableSecurityUnifiedMembersCaching"

  • "EnableSecurityRoleMembersCaching"

  • "EnableSecuritySharePointMembersCaching"

• You can now control the amount of memory caching that you want to allow for your connector with the MemoryCacheThreshold" setting.

For more information, see configure the SharePoint Online connector using web.config.

Certificate-based authentication for specified site collections

• You can now grant the Sites.Selected permissions to restrict access only to the site collections you want to be indexed. For more information, see certificate-based authentication.

Document Library enumeration

• The SharePoint Online connector now uses Microsoft Graph API to enumerate document libraries. This improves the performance of incremental crawls, as only document libraries that require recrawls will be crawled.

v2.0

Fewer Requirements

• Removed requirement to configure multiple Azure apps.

Simpler Configuration and Filtering

• Site collection filter removed
• Datastores are filtered using the Datastore Sync Settings tab under Connection
  • Filter by:
    • URL
    • Title
    • Web Template ID
• Removed outdated and irrelevant options: "Synchronized domain", "Compound delimiters", "Native properties"
• Only site collections (top level sites) are returned as datastores
• Sub-sites and their content are returned during crawl
• Content filtering - Added filtering for sub-sites using the SITEURL parameter
• Connector-controlled, automated, Autofetch functionality

See Release Notes for changes to the Connector.