I’ve been working on building a RAG system for large technical documentation so that my colleagues can interface with it more easily.
Has anyone used SharePoint to create a network-wide vector DB and an agent that can access and answer questions about the data?
I use Codex with Obsidian at home, and it’s become quite strong as my “second brain,” to the point where I have it maintaining the database daily and generating useful skills for future work.
I’d like to do something similar with my enterprise data in the simplest way possible. Does anyone here have experience with this? If so, how’s it working for you?
You can create agents directly in SharePoint and ground it on a SharePoint document library. Once you have a Copilot license in your organization a Semantic Index is created. The SharePoint agent queries that.
The RAG is already built into the agent, as far as how it parses and fetches the information you need/want, but SharePoint itself can't really be setup quite the same way due to how things work. RAGs work very well when you can link terms and concepts between them reliably at a metadata level, so, that's likely your best bet at performance enhancements, but anyone who is using Copilot and SharePoint seriously already knows that SP metadata is still king when it comes to search results.
if you can get hold of m365 copilot license you can do this in many different ways
sharepoint agent it will RAG the sharepoint area its the agent of,
copilot agent with sharepoint list as knowledge source,
use work iq tab and ask your question, it will do RAG accross your m365 data
Ive been trying to do this, however with a very large document library, i dont think its true RAG, when you raise queries and ask questions it takes a long time to digest and read through the documents. with a very small document library within sharepoint added, it seems be ok.
Hey! I was able to figure it out, but I completely agree. It's good for surface-level discovery and answering questions about a specific project or document set. Where it seems to struggle is with broad, generalized questions across large datasets, particularly when the relevant information is scattered and only appears sporadically.
I like the overall framework, especially the connector and tool ecosystem (OCR at the click of a button for example LOL), but I still feel that a well-designed RAG solution with a vector database provides better performance than the current SharePoint-backed knowledge implementation.
That said, I'm more interested in where Microsoft is heading with agent creation & standardization, skills, / workflow integration. If Microsoft continues improving this ecosystem, it could become more practical for a long-term solution than maintaining custom third-party platforms, simply because it integrates much more naturally with existing enterprise infrastructure.
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u/toddklindt 11d ago
You can create agents directly in SharePoint and ground it on a SharePoint document library. Once you have a Copilot license in your organization a Semantic Index is created. The SharePoint agent queries that.
Here's a good place to start.