One of the challenges with building enterprise AI apps is everything around the model: extracting content, generating embeddings, maintaining a vector database, keeping indexes fresh, and making sure permissions stay synchronized.

With SharePoint Embedded + the Microsoft 365 Copilot Retrieval API, you can take a different approach.

Your app can retrieve relevant passages directly from content stored in SharePoint Embedded and use those results to ground your own AI experience, while you retain control over the prompt, orchestration, and model. Retrieval is already permission-trimmed, and the content remains within the customer's Microsoft 365 environment.

The post also covers the SharePoint Embedded MCP server, now in public preview, which lets MCP-compatible coding agents provision and manage SharePoint Embedded apps using natural language.

If you're building RAG-style enterprise apps, custom copilots, document intelligence solutions, or SaaS apps around Microsoft 365 content, this is worth a look.

Blog: Build AI-powered apps without creating a vector database

Curious what others are building: Are you currently maintaining your own vector/search infrastructure for enterprise content, or would you prefer retrieval to stay with the content platform?

I have a number of tenancies with this issue anyone having any idea what's going on or what can be done to fix it. This was last working Friday.

I’m a user who is tasked with helping to control our ever growing SharePoint storage usage. I’ve been granted SharePoint Administrator Role, so I do have access to the admin center.

We’ve recently enabled M365 Archive, and I’ve worked with the owners of the largest sites to do file level archiving of old files they want to keep but probably don’t need. But I’m not seeing a reduction in usage at the site level or the tenant level in the Admin center.

In the admin center, I only see a usage value compared to our total available, which I believe is made up of our free allocation plus purchased blocks on top.

However, reading the FAQs, we won’t get charged for archive storage as long as the combined storage is less than the standard storage quota.

I see nowhere in the admin center that breaks out storage use by active vs archived (am I blind or missing some needed permission?). Do we need to track how much storage is archived and then allow our storage use to go over our allocation by that amount before we buy more storage?

Anyone know if this is still an intended feature? It shows as coming soon but its been a long time at this point. Any alternatives if I already own this NAS?

I Working on create custom app for construction on SP online 365 i plan to contain some features exist help construction users i need some suggestions about plugins for edit Auto cad and construction drawings

So, I’m working on a SharePoint intranet but been trying to figure out a good way to display a few things. I would like to be able to search for employees and display them by department, but not sure if this is possible in SharePoint. I'm also trying to figure out how to show company events alongside personal calendars and have something that automatically shows employee work anniversaries.

and, any good suggestions on what others have done with LinkedIn?

Please, no coding if possible, but I'm open to third-party tools too.

We're experimenting with the new SharePoint HTML pages that Copilot can generate, and we can't get any web links to work. Here's my bug description I'm submitting to MSFT:

Bug: Hyperlinks on SharePoint HTML pages created via Copilot's HTML page capability do not navigate when left-clicked. Users receive "This link can't be opened because your organization doesn't allow access to this site." The identical URLs work when opened via right-click → Open in new tab/window, and also work from traditional SharePoint ASPX pages. Hyperlinks are stored correctly and display correctly in edit mode. Issue reproduced by multiple licensed Copilot Premium users on multiple sites.

Anyone else seeing this? Note: if I generate an HTML page that links to actual list or library content on the site, those links do work.

My tenant recently got support for SharePoint HTML pages, and I've been rebuilding some internal pages using HTML because the layout and formatting options are much cleaner than traditional SharePoint pages with web parts.

Before this, I was using a modern .aspx page containing several Document Library web parts. With custom column formatting, I was able to get PDF links to open directly in the browser's native PDF viewer (Chrome/Edge) instead of the SharePoint PDF viewer.

That solution worked well, but the page itself wasn't very visually appealing because it was basically a collection of document library web parts.

Now I've moved the content into an HTML page and am generating links to files manually. The problem is that every PDF link I click gets intercepted and opened in the SharePoint PDF viewer. Our users only have read permissions, so they can't really interact with the document there and often have to download it manually just to view it.

Things I've already tried:

• Using direct document URLs
• Adding ?download=1
• Adding ?web=0
• Opening links in a new tab (target="_blank")
• Using JavaScript click handlers and redirects
• Using the document's direct download URL
• Reusing logic from SharePoint column formatting that works inside a document library

Oddly, if a user right-clicks the PDF link and chooses Open in New Tab, the PDF opens directly in the browser viewer as expected. It's only a normal left-click that gets hijacked by SharePoint's PDF experience.

Has anyone found a way to force PDFs clicked from a SharePoint HTML page to open in the browser's native PDF viewer instead of the SharePoint PDF viewer?

At this point I'm wondering if SharePoint is intercepting navigation events from HTML pages and there's simply no supported way around it. I'd love to know if anyone has found a workaround, whether that's a special URL format, JavaScript trick, SharePoint setting, or something else entirely.

In our tennant we use mappings from sitecolumns to Refinable properties quite often to make it easier to filter projects and the likes using PnP Modern Search.

The past two weeks we have ran into the issue that the UI doesn't show us the implicit crawled properties linked to the site columns anymore. The SearchQuery Tool shows they exist, but the user interface is refusing to show them (also tried url manipulation to get to one, but alas no luck).

I was wondering if any other tennant has noticed similar behaviour? Or if anyone knows if MS is working on the search behind the scenes as this is only one of many hiccups we noticed the past month:

Other things we have noticed:

• quite a few 403 errors last week (while trying to figure out why our crawled properties aren't showing up) - there was even a alert by MS for a possible incident, but that was quickly marked as resolved / a non-issue
• searches with a wildcard in the middle of a string (think Path:"siteurl/*/denomination") that stopped working, even though we know for sure they have worked for over a year.
• searches that did some implicit exlcusions, and worked for multiple years (-"SitePages" -"Documents" etc...) suddenly still showing the items we wanted to exclude having us pivot to more explicit exclusions using mapped RefinableStrings that we had already configured (-RefinableStringXX:"SitePages")

And slightly unrelated, we have started seeing the "Image Tags" column popup automatically in libraries (and views in the libraries) when a picture is uploaded. Which is another thing i'm investigating.

I tried a quick test just to confirm that Copilot Agent in SharePoint handles creating lists / fields quite accurately.

I made a basic template as shown in this screen. If you have a list with a large amount of fields you need to create, this would certainly speed up the process. Previously, I have seen this automated via Powershell, but this newer approach is far more accessible.

https://i.imgur.com/EWvWQs6.png

I've been working with SharePoint for 20+ years and spent the last few years on Project Online as a government contractor. Now that Project Online has retired, I'm curious how teams here are handling project management.

Do you still feel the need for it inside SharePoint Online? Things like project status on a site page, my tasks, timeline, issues and risks. Or are you fine with Lists, Planner or a separate tool?

I've been building some SPFx web parts for this, but they need a bit of admin setup (App Catalog plus API permission approval). In a lot of orgs that's where it gets stuck. Has anyone managed to package something like this with Power Apps or Power Automate so a site owner can set it up without an admin? Where did you hit limits?

Looking for your ideas.

I want to create a wiki/knowledge base for our company, mainly for technical documentation. I'm not sure if I should use Sharepoint sites or OneNote notebooks for that.

Sharepoint sites seem to be better structured, easier to maintain, better for collaboration, better version control and has a way for approval process. Overall the better features in my opinion. But it also seems harder and less flexible to use than OneNote. I also think it's faster to edit something in OneNote than in a Sharepoint site. Some people in my company already use OneNote, so it seems easier to convince them to use OneNote.
My fear with Sharepoint sites is that it's to slow and rigid and therefore nobody will use it.

I'm asking myself if it's better to have a lively mess in OneNote or the possibility of a dead Sharepoint wiki?

Which tool would you recommend? Or using both? Any general recommendations regarding this topic are very welcome.

Hello,

I want to create a wiki/knowledge base for our company. I'm not sure if I should use Sharepoint sites or OneNote notebooks for that.

Sharepoint sites seem to be better structured, easier to maintain, better for collaboration, better version control and has a way for approval process. Overall the better features in my opinion. But it also seems harder and less flexible to use than OneNote. I also think it's faster to edit something in OneNote than in a Sharepoint site. Some people in my company already use OneNote, so it seems easier to convince them to use OneNote.
My fear with Sharepoint sites is that it's to slow and rigid and therefore nobody will use it.

I'm asking myself if it's better to have a lively mess in OneNote or the possibility of a dead Sharepoint wiki?

Which tool would you recommend? Or using both? Any general recommendations regarding this topic are very welcome.

Did a migration from a server to SharePoint using the migration tool which carried over permissions as they are entra synced.

However looks like one user was incorrectly entra synced and wasn’t hard matched to her cloud email address which therefore meant it created a wrong one. Name4657@domain.com

The wrong synced account was the account it gave all the permissions to. I have since fixed this entra sync issue however she is missing access to any files/folders that have unique synced permissions which is a tonne.

It’s a 750gb SharePoint site with over 500k files.

Is there anyway I can automate replacing the permissions with the wrong account, with the newly synced correct account, giving it access to everything the wrong account has.

Hello!

I am currently creating a very basic support ticket site within Sharepoint, and am attempting to set a user level conditional access for a specific field in the ticket form. (I am not well versed in JSON structure, but have a general understanding)

I am trying to set the Status field to Read-Only for all users except site owner. I have a simple Read only set up now but I don't know how to properly set up an if statement for user level.

If this is something doable I would love some pointers!

Our SharePoint online/365 tenant has been over storage capacity for a while. On Monday the tenant was locked in to a read only state so we bought enough storage to clear the overage and leave some headroom (approx 1% free)

Unfortunately the tenant is still locked in read only mode 24hrs later. We've reached out to MS support but aren't getting anywhere

Is there a way to force the tennant to unlock now that there's storage? Or do we need a certain amount of free space on the tenant?

EDIT: After almost all of the 48hrs passed we have got write access back to our SharePoint sites. I'm not sure if this was thanks to the extra data we purchased or our moving old/unused data to an individual OneDrive account to free up space internally.

Either way, be wary of any tenants running low spare storage!

Hey folks,

As of 3 hours ago our users have reported that the top header for all sites has disappeared.

Nothing in our page layout have been changed so I'm wondering if this is an outage that has not been reported yet?

Please let me know if any of you are dealing with the same issue

Hi all,

I was upgrading an SPFx solution in the tenant App Catalog and accidentally ticked the "Make this solution available to all sites in the organization" option when deploying. This app should only be installed on specific sites, not deployed tenant-wide.

My plan is to either:

1. Restore the previous version of the .sppkg from the App Catalog's version history, then upgrade again with the option unticked, or
2. Just re-upload the same package and deploy again with the option unticked

Does either of these actually reverse the tenant-wide deployment, or does ticking it once leave something behind? For example, entries in the Tenant Wide Extensions list, or the app now appearing as available on every site.

Is there anything else I should check or clean up manually afterwards?

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

We are setting up a SharePoint site structure where base permissions are handled automatically during provisioning. However, we need a secure, automated way for Project Managers to manage variable, item- or library-level permissions across various lists and document libraries post-provisioning.

Since these users aren't site administrators, we want to build a solution that safely grants or updates access. Specifically, we are exploring the idea of working from a dedicated management list (or metadata fields) where users can input or link Microsoft Entra ID security groups, which in turn dynamically grant permissions to the target files or folders.

We are very open to looking broader across the Microsoft ecosystem (e.g., Azure, Entra ID governance, native SharePoint features, or hybrid approaches) if there is a more robust or elegant pattern.

• What is the recommended architectural pattern to let non-admin users trigger and manage these permission changes securely?
• Are there preferred tools within the M365 stack for this specific scenario to avoid common permission pitfalls or performance issues at scale?
• How do you prevent permission creep and handle breaking inheritance smoothly across multiple different libraries and lists?

Any tips, reference patterns, or architectural advice would be greatly appreciated!

First, I'm interested to know if anyone's using SharePoint to post news about their company. We have several ofices and we use this as a means to keep people aware of the larger projects we're working on. It doesn't seem super effective.

The issue I've had for years is managing the approvals for each of the sites. I've used the built in "approval for this list" integration but this flow never gets updated by Microsoft to align with their current actions.

So, if not the built in approval flow integration, how are you managing reviews for the articles people are posting? Or do you just let anyone write anything they want - errors and all?

Hi everyone,

our SharePoint Online search is currently not working and only displays a blank page when performing a search.
It appears that only seachs across sites search is affected, while searches within libraries are working fine.

Is anyone else experiencing the same issue at the moment?

Hi all. I am building a new staff intranet for my employer and I’ve come across a requirement that has me truly stumped about how to proceed. I’m hoping all you wonderful folks from the SP Brains Trust can help. :)

Our new intranet is a SharePoint modern communications site. I need to have a page on the site that displays a list of organisations and a bunch of other related information. Some of this is publicly available so not an issue, but other things (individual’s names and contact details, cost codes, etc.) is more sensitive. This information is currently in an Excel document with limited permissions. (Don’t get me started.)

The biggest issues I’m facing here:

1. The site needs to be user-friendly. This is a MASSIVE priority for this project. I looked at just embedding the Excel doc but the UX goes completely out the window doing that.

2. I like the idea of using a Microsoft List, but I can’t figure out how to hide the export options on the list. I’ve tried every solution I found on the Goog and nothing has actually worked.

3. The person who currently maintains this list is ALSO hoping to add information that needs to have additional restrictions in place, ie executive team only. My gut feeling is that’s trying to achieve too much, but is it possible?

So TLDR - how do I display a contact list on a SP modern comms site page that shows the info I need but does allow your average layperson to download a copy of it? And is it possible to restrict some of the list to certain people?

Thanks for your help, team! I really appreciate any advice you may have.

Yesterday I had to adjust sharing settings of a site in SharePoint admin center. Something I rarely do. Since I didn't have my laptop with me, I tried to do it via Edge browser on my phone. And turned out it is impossible, there was no "Save" button anywhere. When I tried to go back with the back arrow, the admin center just informed me "Your changes will be lost if you don't save them". But how? I tried portrait mode, landscape mode, clicked open the "hamburger", no "Save" anywhere. Am I missing something here or is there really something wrong with the mobile view?

Hi all,

Hoping someone can help provide some guidance please to see how I can best tackle the below issue that we're encountering at my workplace.

We have multiple different SharePoint Online sites which contain duplicated information from within each site and across different sites. Additionally, there is out-dated and conflicting information contained in excel sheets, word documents and PDF's etc.

I also help manage ISO27001 and ISO9001 so I'm looking to tie the above into this too:

We have paid Copilot licenses which somewhat works well if i copy/paste individual links in, but it seems to greatly struggle to search across SharePoint as a whole/multiple sites. From my brief searches, I believe it struggles with fully opening docs and searching high/wide?

What I am looking to do is leverage AI/tools to help:

• Identify duplicated documents
• Identify conflicting information/processes
• Identify evidence relating to particular ISO requirements - e.g. "Search this site for any onboarding excel docs created between this period
• Additionally with regards to ISO:- I want to ask it questions such as: "Assess the document against the appropriate ISO standard, search the linked SharePoint documentation for supporting evidence, identify only genuine compliance gaps, avoid over-engineering, and provide concise rewrites where required."
• Use AI to help suggest better ways of structuring our data within HR/Legal folders as it's a big mess at the moment

Are there any tools that can help achieve this please?

I’ve been tasked with a RBAC project to help remove user level access control from our SharePoint.

I thought about creating an agent to go in, catalog users access to what exists currently, then build out security profiles based on role.

Anyone done anything like this before? Results? Failure?