Microsoft SharePoint On Prem

What documents are crawled

• Only documents that are supported by Discovery are crawled; all others are ignored. For more information, see Supported file types.
• Document-level security is supported. When this option is enabled, your users can crawl and query the same content that they can access when they are logged in to SharePoint. For more information, see Supporting document-level security.
• When a source is recrawled, new documents are added, updated documents are modified to the current version, and deleted documents are deleted from the collection's index.
• All Discovery data source connectors are read-only. Regardless of the permissions that are granted to the crawl account, Discovery never writes, updates, or deletes any content in the original data source.

Data source requirements

In addition to the data source requirements for all installed deployments, your SharePoint On Prem data source must meet the following requirements:

• The data source connection supports SharePoint 2013, 2016, or 2019.
• You must obtain any required service licenses for the data source that you want to connect to. For more information about licenses, contact the system administrator of the data source.

For more information about SharePoint On Prem, see Microsoft SharePoint developer documentation.

Prerequisite steps

Before you create a SharePoint On Prem collection, you must do the following things:

1. Work with the Sharepoint administrator to coordinate the set up of full read access for the web application.

   For more information, see Manage permissions for a web application in Sharepoint Server.

2. If you want to enable document-level security, you must take some steps to set it up. For more information, see Supporting document-level security.

   You must collect the following information from the LDAP administrator:

   LDAP server URL

   The LDAP server URL to connect to, for example ldap://<ldap_server>:<port>.

   LDAP binding username

   The username used to bind to the directory service. In most cases, this username is a distinguished name (DN). The logon name might sometimes work with Active Directory. But unlike the general Windows logon, it is case sensitive. The distinguished name always works.

   LDAP binding user password

   The password used to bind to the directory service.

   LDAP base DN

   The starting point for searching user entries in LDAP, for example CN=Users,DC=example,DC=com.

   LDAP user filter

   The user filter to search user entries in LDAP. If unspecified, the default value is (userPrincipalName={0}).

If you are using version 2.2.1 or earlier, then you must complete some extra prerequisite tasks before you can connect to the data source. For more information, see SharePoint On Prem prerequisite steps for prior releases.

Connecting to a SharePoint On Prem data source

From your Discovery project, complete the following steps:

1. From the navigation pane, choose Manage collections.

2. Click New collection.

3. Click SharePoint On Prem, and then click Next.

4. Name the collection.

5. If the language of the documents in SharePoint is not English, select the appropriate language.

   For a list of supported languages, see Language support.

6. Optional: Change the synchronization schedule.

   For more information, see Crawl schedule options.

7. In the Enter your credentials section, complete the following fields:

   Username

   The username of the SharePoint user with access to all sites and lists that need to be crawled and indexed.

   Password

   The password of the SharePoint user.

   This value is never returned and is only used when you create or modify credentials.

8. Optional: If you want to use Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) claims-based authentication, set the Enable SAML authentication switch to On. Otherwise, Windows NT LAN Manager (NTLM) authentication is used. Add values to the following fields:

   Identity Provider endpoint

   The URL of the Identity Provider endpoint, for example https://adfs.server.example.com/adfs/services/trust/2005/UsernameMixed.

   Relying Party endpoint

   Optional. The URL of the Relying Party Trust endpoint. If unspecified, the following value is used: https://<sharepoint_server>:<port>/_trust/.

   Relying Party Trust identifier

   The URL of the Relying Party Trust identifier, for example urn:sharepoint:sample. If unspecified, the following value is used: https://<sharepoint_server>:<port>/_trust/. This feature is available in the 2013, 2016, and 2019 versions.

9. In the Specify what you want to crawl section, add the SharePoint web service URL to the Web Application Url field. For example, https://<host>:<port>.

10. Optional: If you are using a proxy server to access the data source server, then in the Proxy settings section, set the Enable proxy settings switch to On. Add values to the following fields:

    Username

    Optional. The proxy server username to authenticate, if the proxy server requires authentication. If you do not know your username, you can obtain it from the administrator of your proxy server.

    Password

    Optional. The proxy server password to authenticate, if the proxy server requires authentication. If you do not know your password, you can obtain it from the administrator of your proxy server.

    Proxy server host name or IP address

    The hostname or the IP address of the proxy server.

    Proxy server port number

    The network port that you want to connect to on the proxy server.

11. Optional: If you want to activate document-level security, in the Security section, set the Enable Document Level Security switch to On.

    When this option is enabled, your users can crawl and query the same content that they can access when they are logged in to SharePoint. Complete the prerequisite steps to add support.

    When you enable this option, you must provide values for the following fields:

    LDAP server URL

    The LDAP server URL to connect to, for example ldap://<ldap_server>:<port>.

    LDAP binding username

    The username used to bind to the directory service. In most cases, this username is a distinguished name (DN). The logon name might sometimes work with Active Directory. But unlike the general Windows logon, it is case sensitive. The distinguished name always works.

    LDAP binding user password

    The password used to bind to the directory service.

    LDAP base DN

    The starting point for searching user entries in LDAP, for example CN=Users,DC=example,DC=com.

    LDAP user filter

    The user filter to search user entries in LDAP. If unspecified, the default value is (userPrincipalName={0}).

12. If you want the crawler to extract text from images on the site, expand More processing settings, and set Apply optical character recognition (OCR) to On.

    When OCR is enabled and your documents contain images, processing takes longer. For more information, see Optical character recognition.

13. Click Finish.

The collection is created quickly. It takes more time for the data to be processed as it is added to the collection.

If you want to check the progress, go to the Activity page. From the navigation pane, click Manage collections, and then click to open the collection.