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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2026-10-02
About the SharePoint Connector for Self-Service Agent

About the SharePoint Connector for Self-Service Agent

This topic describes capabilities, limitations, and best practices related to the Microsoft SharePoint integration with Self-Service Agent.

SharePoint Guidelines Overview

The Microsoft SharePoint Connector only works with SharePoint Online (using M365) and doesn't support on-premises versions, including SharePoint Server Subscription Edition (SE), or legacy versions like 2016 or 2019.
We recommend using a service user account rather than an employee’s account to avoid disconnection in the event of the employee’s departure.
The SharePoint events that are tracked for ingesting updates into Workday are:
  • Creating new files in a target folder.
  • Deleting files from a target folder.
  • Changing file contents or deleting a file..
  • Permission changes at the folder or file level
Workday doesn't currently track changes to the SharePoint lists.

Security, Synced Changes, and Architecture

Workday retrieves the policy files and the associated access controls from SharePoint and stores the data inside Workday. We ingest the file contents and permissions so that the Self-Service Agent can provide answers with minimal latency.
We cross-reference the SharePoint file permissions with the user's primary work email address in their Workday profile. When a user doesn't have permission to view a file in SharePoint, the agent won't use it to answer their question. One of the most common reasons that the agent doesn't use a file to answer a user is due to email mismatches between Workday and SharePoint. Ensure that email addresses in Microsoft match what's stored in Workday for your employees.
You must wait at least 24 hours for file modifications to reflect in Policy Intelligence answers. This includes editing content, deleting documents, and adding new files. Permission updates are checked in SharePoint every 3 hours.
We use document hashing to remove duplicate file contents during ingestion. However, as a first version limitation, the system appends all external SharePoint URLs associated with that duplicate content to the metadata. This means that when a user has access to a file variant, the Self-Service Agent might accidentally display a source link to a duplicate folder or site in SharePoint the user doesn't have direct access to. For optimal experience, avoid maintaining identical documents across different folders or filenames.
The SharePoint connection dialog is directly from Microsoft, and Workday has no access to the data in that dialog. After you complete the process, Microsoft informs Workday that they successfully authenticated you.
We don't support Microsoft custom app registration.
When the Self-Service Agent uses the Policy Intelligence skill to answer a question, it checks for both:
  • Help articles (when the Workday tenant has the Help SKU).
  • SharePoint files (when it’s been configured).
Currently, the agent doesn't prioritize one source over the other.
Workday only ingests the latest version of the file to reduce scenarios where the agent provides outdated information.

Versioning

Ensure the SharePoint service account only has access to major versions that are deemed published. Otherwise, the agent will provide answers from content that isn't ready to be seen by a broader audience.
You can use minor versions for drafts but we don’t currently ingest minor versions.

File and Ingestion Limits

The feature is currently optimized to ingest up to 1,000 files totaling 200 MB of content within a 24-hour window. When the number of files you select exceeds 200 MB, Workday won't ingest all of the files and won't indicate which files were and weren't ingested. Ensure you select less than 200 MB of content.
Workday ingests these files types:
  • Text files.
  • PDF, non-scanned, text-stractable.
  • Office files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx).
  • HTML pages, only content embedded inside HTML elements, not dynamically generated through Javascript.
Google file formats (docs, sheets, slides), older Office file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt), and any file type not listed here are not currently supported.
Files that are password-protected, encrypted or PDFs containing scripting will never be supported.
Files in the SharePoint root site aren’t currently ingested and display a status of
unknown
. As a workaround, we recommend moving the files into a folder so that they can sync successfully to Workday.

Content and Capabilities

The SharePoint integration currently supports text extraction only; it can't process or return standalone images, videos, graphs, charts, or complex tables. When a table is present, the raw text will be pulled, but the agent can't perform calculations across columns or rows. To ensure best results, we recommend that you:
  • Keep tables short and simple.
  • Clearly label table rows and columns.
  • Incorporate text from images into articles.
We don't read text formatting with hyperlinks. You must spell out the URLs in the policy files for the agent to provide them in responses. Example:
Go to http://www.mybenefits.com/home for more information.
 is the correct URL formatting while
Go to
My Benefits
portal for more information.
 is incorrect.
Because Workday can't follow links in policy documents to answer users questions, if there is important content in linked content, incorporate the information into the main policy document or include the linked document in the ingestion process in the
Documents
tab.

Language and Region Support

The SharePoint connector is currently unsupported in Japan and India regions. Anyone attempting to configure the SharePoint connector in these regions will receive an error and be unable to complete the configuration.
The SharePoint integration supports all level 1 languages in Workday but doesn't implicitly support the region, meaning the Policy Intelligence skill is unaware of the region for a given policy file. The agent uses the employee’s location in Workday to match to results from policies based on semantic search results.
When we ingest the file, we run the file contents through a language classifier and the classifier takes a random sampling of text to identify the language. Based on that classifier's conclusion, we assume 1 language per policy document and tag the entire document based on the dominant language detected. Mixed-language files (Example: An English section within a primarily Spanish document) aren't fully supported and might fail to surface properly for English speakers.

Help SKU and the SharePoint Connector

The SharePoint connector for Policy Intelligence doesn't require the Workday Help SKU. However, if you want to use Workday Help in addition to SharePoint, then the Workday Help SKU is required.
When you don’t have the Workday Help SKU, you must configure SharePoint before enabling the Policy Intelligence skill; otherwise, we display an error and the skill won’t be enabled.
If you have the:
  • Workday Help SKU and don't configure the SharePoint connector, the Self-Service Agent provides answers from your Help articles only.
  • SharePoint connector configured and don't have the Help SKU, the Self-Service Agent provides answers from your SharePoint documents only.
  • SharePoint connector configured and the Help SKU, the Self-Service Agent provides answers from both. We recommend that you have a single policy in 1 system or the other so that the agent doesn’t provide inaccurate answers.
There are no additional costs for configuring the SharePoint connector or for storing policy files in Workday. The Policy Intelligence skill consumes the same amount of Flex Credits irrespective of where the answer came from.

Best Practices

Tables and images:
 Keep tables short and simple with clearly labeled rows and columns, and incorporate the text from images in their knowledge base articles.
URLs:
 Spell out the URLs in the policy files so that the agent includes them in a response.
Multilingual support:
 Keep separate files for each language and each policy. Because the language is identified for the entire document, and not at the paragraph level, when you mix languages in a single file, the answers can be wrong.
Multiregion support:
 We recommend that you separate policies for each region rather than combining them into a single document. Put the region name in the file title in SharePoint to help the agent identify policies per region. Also, assign security groups based on region so that the agent can provide a more targeted response. Example:
Leave of Absence - Canada.pdf
 and
Leave of Absence - United States.pdf
instead of
Leave of Absence - Canada and United States.pdf
.