Restricted SharePoint Search is a new Microsoft feature to mitigate sites oversharing issue when you are implementing Copilot. The feature is documented here, but still I have some questions, e.g.:
- How about external data? Copilot can use external data to learn from via agents and connectors. But would Restricted SharePoint Search if implemented allow data from external connectors to be used in copilot?
- “Users’ OneDrive files, chats, emails, calendars they have access to” – means own data for every single user or all shared OD data?
- What exactly is “Files from their frequently visited SharePoint sites”? I mean, how frequently user needs to visit site for this?
- What exactly means “Files that the users viewed, edited, or created.”
- What about teams chat messages, e-mails, viva engage messages?
- “Files that were shared directly with the users” – does that mean “individual files shared” or can include folders, libraries, sites?
- If user is a member of a teams – would all team content included?
- It says “Files…” but would site pages be included? Or list items? Or list items attachments? Pages is something that people use to create wiki to share knowledge.
- How long it takes for Microsoft 365 to start restricting results after Restricted SharePoint Search is enabled
- How to deal with “You do not have the required license to perform this operation”
Here I’m going to answer the questions above.
So far I build a test scenario using my dev tenant that includes multiple collaborated users and content in the form of files, pages, list items and messages spreaded across multiple sites falling into different categories of Restricted SharePoint Search allowed content.
You do not have the required license…
If you are getting “You do not have the required license to perform this operation” when you are trying Get-SPOTenantRestrictedSearchMode or Get-PnPTenantRestrictedSearchMode – that means there is no Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses assigned to tenant yet. This feature – Restricted SharePoint Search – works only when at least one Copilot license is assigned to tenant.
… TBC
References