SharePoint Online delivers the powerful features of SharePoint in the cloud - without the overhead of managing the infrastructure on your own.

SharePoint Online is available as a standalone offering or as part of the Microsoft 365 suite. It is increasingly used as part of Hybrid SharePoint configurations.  Many organizations use SharePoint Online for specific purposes (for example teamsites and external collaboration) while hosting other sites on-premise; many other organizations use SharePoint Online for all of their collaboration, including a wide range of use cases.

BA Insight provides a complete set of solutions for Office 365 and Hybrid SharePoint.  Our SharePoint Online Connector provides secure, high-performance crawling of content in SharePoint Online.  Most frequently, the SharePoint Online Connector is used to create a unified search index (with content from multiple sources) in SharePoint Server on-prem.  It is also used with other search engines such as Azure Search for other applications.

Connectors for SharePoint

The SharePoint Online Connector honors the security of the source application and provides both full and incremental crawls so the users have the latest information available to them all the time.

How BA Insight Improves on SharePoint Out of the Box (OOTB)

SharePoint Server comes with OOTB connectors for SharePoint content and sites, and for SharePoint people profiles.  However, these do not support crawling SharePoint Online.

BA Insight’s SharePoint Online Connector allows you to connect to SharePoint Online, fetch data from any site, document library, or list; and index this content securely.  It securely indexes both the full text and metadata of documents in SharePoint Online into SharePoint’s search engine, enabling a single searchable result set across content from multiple repositories. This allows organizations to tap into the wealth of information accessible within SharePoint Online, SharePoint on-premise, and other repositories, and make that data instantly actionable to users through search.

The BA Insight SharePoint Online Connector provides full security and operates at high throughput to minimize crawl times while maintaining a low performance impact on SharePoint Online. We maintain high throughput and avoid impacting SharePoint Online Service through our “light touch” approach, including full implementation of the SharePoint Online throttling protocol.

BA Insight’s SharePoint Online Connector only requires read access rights.  SharePoint Online differs from the on-premise SharePoint server in that there is not a Central Administration from which you can assign the "index user" with "Full Read" access to each SharePoint Web Application to which a connection will be established. Therefore, you must provide the index user with the required permissions for each site whose documents you want included in the index.   When this is the case, the connector can provide seamless and simultaneous access to all desired SharePoint Online content.

Our SharePoint Online Connector:

  • Provides security trimming, only surfacing the content that users are permitted to see.
  • Minimizes the impact on the source application, ensuring no impact to its performance.
  • Provides both full and incremental crawl so users have the latest information.
  • Indexes every desired item with high throughput while avoiding any impact on SharePoint Online’s performance.
  • Provides a single consolidated search index referencing SharePoint Online content, along with content from SharePoint on-premise and other repositories, resulting in a single unified result set.
  • After SharePoint Online is crawled, the search index has a representation pointing to the original content. This enables the users to click on a search result and be taken to the original item or document.
  • Works with all types of data

Future-proof Your Investment for New SharePoint Versions and O365

Microsoft is continually updating SharePoint Online. BA Insight does the hard work of keeping the connector up to date for both SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premise.

The upgrades are easy to do and can be done by your IT organization. It is a matter of accessing the BA Insight customer portal, downloading the latest release and installing and configuring it.  Or, if desired, our professional services team can handle the upgrades.

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Drive Organizational Productivity

By including SharePoint Online content and applications in a unified search index, you increase adoption of your intranet, improving organizational efficiency and productivity.