Configure the SharePoint Online indexer
Tags: sharepoint, openai, azure
Published: 2024-05-04 01:15:16

What is Azure SharePoint Indexer?
Azure SharePoint Indexer is like a smart librarian for your digital documents. It organizes and catalogs your files stored in SharePoint document libraries, making them easily searchable and accessible. It’s a crawler that extracts data and metadata, ensuring that your documents are indexed and ready for search.

What is Azure OpenAI?
Azure OpenAI is a cutting-edge AI service that provides access to powerful models like GPT-3.5, which can understand and generate human-like text. It’s like having a super-smart assistant that can write, summarize, translate, and even code!

How Do They Work Together?
When Azure SharePoint Indexer and Azure OpenAI join forces, they create a powerhouse for your data. Here’s how:

Indexing: Azure SharePoint Indexer goes through your SharePoint libraries, indexing the content. Think of it as putting all your books (documents) in order on the shelves (the cloud).
Connecting: Using a custom connector, Azure SharePoint Indexer’s data can be fed into Azure OpenAI. This is like giving your super-smart assistant access to all the books in the library.
Processing: Azure OpenAI can then process this indexed data. Whether it’s answering questions, summarizing reports, or generating insights, Azure OpenAI uses the indexed content to provide valuable outputs.
Enhancing Business Applications: This integration can be brought into Power Apps, enhancing business applications with the ability to understand and interact with your SharePoint data in natural language.
Benefits of Integration
Efficiency: Automate the organization of your SharePoint content and make it easily searchable.
Insights: Gain deeper insights from your data using Azure OpenAI’s advanced AI capabilities.
Accessibility: Make your data work for you in new and innovative ways, accessible right from your business applications.
Setting Up the Integration
Setting up this integration involves a few steps:

Create a Data Source: Use the Azure Cognitive Search Preview REST API to create a new data source for Azure Cognitive Search1.
Create an Index: Leverage the metadata of your documents to enhance your search experience, again using the REST API2.
Connect to Azure OpenAI: With the Azure Cognitive Search now indexing information about the SharePoint contents, utilizing this information in Azure OpenAI becomes a simple task

**How about private network setup?
**Trying to understand what are the application permission and delegated permission 

Now, inside your clubhouse, you have a magic robot named Indexer. This robot likes to organize all your toys (which are actually files and information) so you can find them easily when you want to play.

But the robot needs a magic key to open all the toy boxes. There are two types of magic keys:

A Big Key (Application Permissions): This key is super special. It can open all the toy boxes in the clubhouse, no matter what. But to get this key, the big boss of the land (the tenant admin) has to say it’s okay.
A Little Key (Delegated Permissions): This key is smaller and can only open the toy boxes that you say it can. It’s like if you tell the robot, “You can only play with the toys I say you can.” But this key gets lost every hour, and you have to find it again (re-authenticate), which can be a bit annoying.
For your clubhouse to be safe and the robot to work well, you should use the Big Key because it’s easier and you don’t have to keep finding it again and again.

And to make sure the robot can talk to other clubhouses safely without going outside where everyone can see, you make a secret tunnel called a Private Link. This way, the robot can pass messages and still stay safe inside your private clubhouse.

So, you give the robot the Big Key, make the secret tunnel, and then the robot can keep all your toys organized without any trouble! And your clubhouse stays a fun and safe place to play. 😊🔑🤖