In today's AI landscape integrating external data sources seamlessly into enterprise solutions is crucial for maintaining a competitive advantage. The NetApp Neo Copilot Connector offers a powerful solution for enhancing Microsoft 365 Copilot by enabling the integration of external data, thereby improving productivity and decision-making processes. This article explores the benefits and implementation of the NetApp Neo Copilot Connector in transforming Microsoft 365 Copilot into a more robust and versatile tool for modern enterprises.
Background
Copilot responses are only as good as the data you provide to it. Basic responses leverage out of box integrations like Microsoft 365 Copilot’s integration with existing Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) documents, such as word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, teams. In other words, for Copilot to answer questions about your business and customers access to external data sources, such as file shares, is needed.
Here's a typical Microsoft 365 Copilot response, when data is outside of Microsoft 365.
What are Copilot Connectors?
Copilot Connectors enable organizations to access external data efficiently, allowing organizations to utilize Copilot in an enhanced way, without moving all their data into Microsoft 365. This strategy is both secure and efficient while also allowing organizations to bring Microsoft 365 Copilot to data that doesn't live within Microsoft 365.What value does NetApp Neo Copilot Connectors provide?
Organizations with data on NetApp storage are utilizing the NetApp Connector for Microsoft 365 Copilot. The earliest version of this connector, released in October 2024, evolved from what was once a Microsoft reference architecture based on a virtual machine. Now packaged as an easily deployable container application, it provides an enhancement to the Microsoft file share connector, allowing organizations with NetApp data to bring their data into the Copilot experience with no file migration or security changes required. The connector is scalable, simple to deploy, and offers a highly performant container-based solution with the following market leading features:
- GPU and OCR support – extract accurate information from complex enterprise documents at scale with support for CUDA processing. This ensures Copilot has high-quality data for grounding user or agent queries.
- Item level permissions - the connector automatically resolves on-premises AD based ACLs to their corresponding Microsoft Entra based objects, ensuring users will only ever access Copilot responses from data which they have permission to.
- No maximum size of file - the connector can extract from any size of source document (many other connectors will process up to 100MB sized files).
- Containerized deployment - quickly deploy the connector with Helm charts or via Docker-compose. If you don't have Kubernetes, you can run the container in Azure Container Instances or similar solutions. You can even use Docker in a VM.
- Industry leading performance - the 2.x generation connector extracts information 40 times faster than prior VM based generations. These gains are due to parallelization and distributed architecture - using all provisioned resources (Cores, Memory and optionally GPU).
- Highly accurate extraction - the connector ensures that extracted data from complex file types such as PDFs is accurate, maintaining the structure and context of the source document including embedded images, audio and OCR recognition.
- Broad file type support - the connector supports all common file types that contain extractable information - the list is too large to publish here. This includes all popular office and open office file types, PDF, images, audio and more.
These features ensure that your data is accurately and securely available to Microsoft 365 Copilot, with no changes to the way your users work today. This process enables Copilot to seek external knowledge to enrich its contextual understanding using your organizational data.
So, what happens when you have connected your external files to Copilot? Let's revisit our earlier example:
Detailed results using your organization’s knowledge extracted from enterprise files.
What’s Next?
To try NetApp Neo, sign up here to join the growing list of organizations interested in deploying the NetApp Neo connector.
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