Microsoft Graph connectors continue to be a powerful extensibility option for Microsoft 365 Copilot and Search. They index your valuable organization content in Microsoft Graph.
The Graph also enables Copilot to reason over the entire breadth of your enterprise content. You may index content from data sources like File shares, Service Now, Jira, Confluence, Salesforce etc. and deploy Copilot as your complete AI-powered productivity solution.
Here are some recent updates related to Microsoft Graph connectors.
New Microsoft-built Graph connectors
ServiceNow Tickets and Confluence are latest additions to your out of box connectors catalog.
Microsoft Graph connector for ServiceNow Tickets
ServiceNow Tickets is one of the most popular IT ticketing system used to track service requests, events, incidents, and alerts. Graph Connector for ServiceNow Tickets is the third in series of Microsoft-built connectors for ServiceNow, following Knowledge base articles and Catalog items connectors. Effective discovery and tracking of tickets streamlines the IT processes and increases resolution speed. The connector addresses the need to access ServiceNow tickets from within the M365 ecosystem, a common ask of many organizations.
It indexes ServiceNow tickets in Microsoft Graph, making it easier to find relevant ticket information and get answers to enterprise knowledge questions in a single place. Thereby directly improving productivity, collaboration, and customer satisfaction.
Users will be able to index ticket properties from the task table in ServiceNow, enabling them to find relevant ticket information quickly and easily. The connector also supports indexing tickets properties from extended task tables, providing flexibility and control over the indexed information.
Admins can choose to go with ServiceNow access levels, and also select property mapping to users. This ensures that the ticket information is only visible to the authorized users and respects the data privacy and security policies of the organization.
The connector is now available in targeted release, and you may configure it from the M365 Admin center. The connector will be generally available in December 2023.
Microsoft Graph connector for Confluence server/datacenter
Confluence is a wiki platform used for collaboration, knowledge management, and documentation. Microsoft Graph connector for Confluence server/data center allows you to index Confluence Server or Data center content in Microsoft Graph. This is the second Confluence connector following the first one Confluence cloud connector, which is generally available already.
Indexing Confluence for Microsoft Copilot and Search enables teams to collaborate efficiently and end-users to retrieve information quickly. The Confluence On-Premises Connector honors the Confluence's environment permissions and allows authorized users to indexed content.
The connector is in preview. If you wish to get early access to try it, sign-up using this form.
Better manageability of your connections
Staged rollout
Staged Rollout feature allows you to gradually introduce Graph connectors to a select group of users in your production environment. You can use it to deploy an existing or new connection to a limited number of users, monitor performance, and adjust settings as needed. One can also expand or shrink the scope of the rollout at any time. When you're ready, you can end the staged rollout and deploy the connection to the entire organization (or to all applicable users).
Staged rollout can be setup on a connection as follows:
- In the Search and Intelligence portal, under the Data Sources tab, go to 'Display all connections' section. The connection list has a column 'Staged Rollout'. The link under this column can be used to add or edit staged rollout settings.
- While creating a new connection, one can use the 'Publish to limited users' button alongside the 'Publish' button.
- The list of users and groups can be added in the staging config.
Learn more about Staged rollout feature in the documentation. Staged rollout capability is currently being rolled out world-wide and is expected to be generally available by December 2023.
Advanced crawl scheduling
Advanced Crawl Scheduling for Microsoft Graph connectors provides admins with greater flexibility over the scheduling of their connection crawls.
Admins can now schedule crawls to occur during specific hours of the day and on specific days of the week. This allows them to better plan their crawls and avoid potential conflicts with other system activities.
The new advanced crawl scheduling options are now generally available, and you may re-configure any existing crawls to follow desired new schedule. The same can be done by editing your connections and making changes in the “Refresh Settings”. You will see new scheduling options while creating a new connection as well. All the existing schedules have been automatically translated into the advanced scheduling configuration. So, you do not need to worry about losing your existing schedules.
To know more advanced crawl scheduling refer our documentation about setting crawl schedules.
Service Health notifications
Service Health notifications help customers stay informed about the status of their Graph Connector crawls and take actions when necessary.
One of the challenges that admins face when using Graph Connectors is keeping track of crawl failures. Crawl failures can occur for a variety of reasons, such as authentication issues, data source unreachability, or an unknown internal issue. With the new Graph Connector Notifications feature, admins will be notified about crawl failures and provided with the right information to help them navigate to the respective location to resolve the issue.
By providing timely notifications and actionable information, these notifications will help resolve crawl failures and maintain the freshness of your search index.
Following is a notification sample for admin to act on.
Admins can browse through all the notifications that need action.
Each notification has detail on the actions and diagnostics of the issue.
Service Health notifications are now generally available and can be monitored from the Service Health dashboard on M365 Admin center. You can subscribe to get these notifications over e-mail as well by giving up to two e-mail ids.
To learn more about these notifications refer our documentation page about notifications.
We hope these features improve your overall experience with the Microsoft Graph connectors product. Excited to hear your feedback.