Knowledge Base: SharePoint

Overview

Connecting SharePoint as a knowledge base helps your AI assistant provide accurate, real-time answers by referencing documents, pages, and files already maintained in your organization’s SharePoint environment. This integration is particularly useful for centralizing enterprise knowledge and improving AI responsiveness across various user queries.

To complete this setup, you will:

Register and configure an application in Microsoft Entra ID
Grant the necessary permissions for SharePoint access
Enter your credentials into MangoApps AI Studio

What You Will Need

Before you begin, make sure you have the following details and credentials:

SharePoint administrator login credentials
Your SharePoint site URL Example: https://yourdomain.sharepoint.com/sites/mysite
Microsoft Entra ID login credentials
Client authentication credentials, including:
- Domain Name
- Tenant ID
- Application Client ID
- Application Secret Key

Microsoft Entra ID Setup

To securely connect SharePoint to MangoApps, you’ll first need to register an application in Microsoft Entra ID. This step creates the credentials your AI assistant will use to access SharePoint content—follow the steps below to complete the registration and collect the necessary IDs.

Step 1: Register Your Application in Microsoft Entra ID

To enable secure access to SharePoint, you need to register a new application in Microsoft Entra ID.

Enter a name for your application. Under Supported account types, select: Accounts in this organizational directory only.

Click the Register button.

On the Overview tab, take note of the:

Application (client) ID
Directory (tenant) ID

These values will be used later when setting up the MangoApps knowledge base.

Step 2: Configure Authentication

Next, define how your application will authenticate with SharePoint.

From your application's page, go to Authentication under the Manage menu.

Under Advanced settings, set:

Allow public client flows to No for confidential client apps (recommended).
Set to Yes only if using mobile or JavaScript-based tools. A certificate or secret is not required for public client applications.

(Optional) If needed, click Add a platform to configure a redirect URL for specific tools.

Step 3: Certificates & Secrets

You will now create a client secret that will allow MangoApps to authenticate securely.

Navigate to Certificates & secrets under the Manage menu. Click New client secret.

Provide a description and select an expiration date.

After creation, copy and securely store the Secret Value — you won’t be able to view it again.

Step 4: Add API Permissions

These permissions allow your app to read data from SharePoint.

Navigate to API permissions under the Manage menu and click Add a permission.

Select Microsoft Graph > Delegated permissions > "AllSites.Read"

Click Grant admin consent for your domain.

MangoApps Setup

Now that your application is registered and permissions are in place, configure MangoApps to use SharePoint as a knowledge base.

Step 5: Add SharePoint as a Knowledge Base Source

Navigate to Admin Portal > Modules > AI Studio > External KBs. Click the Create a knowledge base button located in the top right of your screen.

Select SharePoint as your data source to access the SharePoint Knowledge Base configurations.

In this new menu, fill in the following information in the Configure Knowledge Base section:

Name and Description for the Knowledge Base
SharePoint Site URL(s) to include in the crawl
Your SharePoint domain name

Step 6: Enter Connector Authentication Credentials

Now we will fill out the information in the Source Authentication section. Start by entering the SharePoint Directory (tenant) ID from Step 1 of setup.

In the Connector Authentication Credentials section, enter the following 4 rows of credentials:

Key

Value

username

Your Microsoft Entra ID email

password

Your Microsoft Entra ID password

clientID

Application (client) ID from Step 1

clientSecret

Secret Value generated in Step 3 of this setup

Step 7: (Optional) Add Regex Filters

You can filter the SharePoint content using inclusion/exclusion rules in order to crawl specific SharePoint document metadata via Regex Filters.

Inclusion/exclusion filters can be applied to the following content types:

Page: Main page title
Event: Event name
File: File name with its extension for attachments and all document files

For example, you can use an exclusion prefix or regular expression pattern to skip crawling files that include the word “private” in their file names. Similarly, you can use an inclusion prefix or regular expression pattern to ensure specific content entities or content types are included.

If a document matches both an inclusion and an exclusion filter, the exclusion filter takes priority, and the document will not be crawled.

To exclude PDF files that contain “private” in the file name, you can use the following regular expression pattern: .*private.*\.pdf