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AI Integration

Building on the Microsoft Stack You Already Pay For

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One interface for most of it

Microsoft Graph exposes mail, calendar, contacts, files, Teams messages, users and groups through a single API with a consistent permission model.

That consistency is what makes 365 integrations quicker to build than a comparable mix of separate products.

What businesses actually build

  1. Shared mailbox triage — classification and routing in Outlook
  2. Document retrieval across SharePoint, respecting existing permissions
  3. Teams assistants answering from internal documentation
  4. Meeting notes to tasks, into Planner or To Do
  5. Excel data extraction and validation from incoming files
The SharePoint permission model is the reason this works well. Retrieval can inherit the access control you already maintain rather than duplicating it.

Permissions are the design

  • Application permissions for background processing, scoped narrowly
  • Delegated permissions where the action is on a user's behalf
  • Sites.Selected rather than blanket SharePoint access
  • Admin consent documented, with the reason for each scope

Over-broad permissions are the most common finding in a review of a 365 integration, and they are avoidable at design time.

Copilot and custom work are not the same question

Copilot is a general assistant across your content. Custom integration is a specific process automated end to end into a specific system.

Plenty of businesses want both. Copilot does not do document extraction into your ERP, and a custom pipeline does not summarise a document someone is reading.

Practical constraints

Graph throttling is real and needs handling. Large SharePoint libraries need incremental sync rather than full crawls. Both are known problems with known solutions.

Budget two to five weeks for a focused integration in an existing tenancy.

Frequently asked questions

Does our data leave the tenancy?

The retrieval and permission side stays inside. The retrieved passages go to whichever model provider you choose, which is the decision to make deliberately.

Do we need Copilot licences?

Not for custom integration. They are separate products solving different problems.

Who approves the permissions?

A tenancy administrator, with documented scopes. Expect that request to take longer than the build if you leave it late.

Can it work with on-premises SharePoint?

Less easily. Graph targets the cloud; on-premises needs a different and generally more laborious approach.

Keep reading

Already paying for Microsoft 365?

There is a lot available through Graph. Tell us where the manual work is and we will scope it.

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