SharePoint AI Search

Access in SharePoint can be set at the site, the library, the folder and the individual item, with inheritance that may be broken at any level. Add sharing links — some anyone-with-the-link, some scoped to named people — and guest access from outside your tenant, and the effective permission on a given file is a computed result rather than a stored fact.

Any assistant over SharePoint must respect that computed result. We read effective permissions through the Microsoft Graph API, carry them into the index as metadata, and filter at retrieval against the identity of the person asking. A document the user could not open in SharePoint is never retrieved, so it cannot be quoted or summarised.

Sensitivity labels matter too. Where your organisation uses Microsoft Purview labels, documents carrying a restricted label can be excluded from indexing entirely rather than merely filtered, which is often what a compliance team will want. That is a policy decision we would ask you to make explicitly at scoping.

The practical reality is that many tenants have permissions nobody fully understands, accumulated over years. Indexing tends to reveal that, and we would rather surface it in a report during the build than have it surface as an answer.