SharePoint Online - Content Registration

Content Registration

Once the relevant Connector has been set up and enabled, any new documents created in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business, and any modifications to existing documents, will be managed by Records365 according to the configuration of your connector. What about any existing content that pre-dated the Connector, you may ask?

The Content Registration process provides a tailored method of locating documents and folders in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business and passing them to their respective Connector for submission to Records365.

Content Registration Architecture

Content Registration is a scripted process driven by Microsoft PowerShell. RecordPoint provides a template script that you can customize according to your requirements and Records365 exposes an API endpoint that this script will call with the details of the documents to be registered by the relevant Connector.

To securely authenticate against SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business and submit content to Records365, a number of prerequisites are required:

• User Credentials that have access to the relevant location in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
• User Credentials for Records365. These may not be the same credentials. See how to Add Users to Records365.
• Azure AD Native Application Registration to delegate authentication to Records365 to the Content Registration script.

Registering an Azure AD Native App

1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. If your account gives you access to more than one, click your account in the top right corner, and set your portal session to the desired Azure AD tenant.
3. Search for App Registrations, and then click New Registration.
4. On the Register an application page, enter the following information and click Register:
   • Name: Content Registration for Records365.
   • Supported account types: Select “Accounts in any organizational directory (Any Azure AD directory – Multitenant)”.
   • Redirect URI:
     • Select “Public client/native (mobile & desktop)”
     • Enter “https://login.microsoftonline.com/common/oauth2/nativeclient”
   
5. You will be taken to the application’s main registration page.
   • Make a note of the Application (client) ID value. This will be required to run the Content Registration script.
     
     
6. Click on Authentication on the sidebar:
   • Select “Yes” for the “Treat application as a public client.” option
   • Click “Save” at the top
     
7. Click on API permissions on the sidebar:
   • Click Add a permission.
   • Click the APIs my organization uses tab.
   • Search for ‘Records365’ and click on it.
   • Select user_impersonation (Access Records365) under Permissions.
   • Click Add permissions.
   
   • Grant Admin Consent for the recently added permission
   

Running the Content Registration script

Parameters

The Content Registration script requires a number of parameters. These describe:

• The Records365 tenant where the script should submit content.
• The SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business locations to connect to and find content.
• Authentication for Records365 and SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business.
• Settings that determine how the script runs.

Mandatory Parameters

Context Parameters

These parameters describe where the script will look for content to submit to Records365. The script is recursive – for example, if the Context supplied is List, then the script will submit all documents or list items contained within the List or Document Library provided by ListTitle, including any folders within that List or Library. Both Site and Web Contexts use the WebUrl parameter supplied above and do not require additional parameters for Context.

Optional Parameters

Example

# Create SecureString password for service
[SecureString] $svcPasswordSecure = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "<ServicePassword>" -AsPlainText -Force# Create SecureString password for SPO
[SecureString] $spoPasswordSecure = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "<ServicePassword>" -AsPlainText -Force .\SPOContentRegistration.ps1 -ServiceUrl "https://<ServiceUrl>/" -ServiceUsername "<ServiceUsername>" -ServicePassword $svcPasswordSecure -WebUrl "https://<SharePointUrl/Site/SubSite>/" -ListTitle "ListName" -Context List -UserName "<UserName>" -ConnectorId <ConnectorId> -Tenant "<Tenant>.onmicrosoft.com" -Audience "https://recordpoint.com/rpfabric" -ClientId <ClientId> -Password $spoPasswordSecure

Connector ID

To retrieve your Connector ID for SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business, go to the Connector Gallery by clicking the cog icon in the top right of the screen. Then, click on your SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business connector tile in the gallery. Your Connector ID is the last segment of the URL in the Address Bar at the top of your browser window:

Versioning Level

Your connector settings will influence on what is submitted to Records365. To make sure the script behaves as you expect, we suggest you review your connector settings by going to the connectors gallery and clicking on the connector you will be performing Content Registration.

Currently, there are two versioning level settings:

• Major Only where the connector submits only records that have their latest changes published or as a major version in the content source (1.0, 2.0, etc)
• Minor and Major where the connector submits both minor and major version changes from the content source (1.0, 1.1, etc)

Registering Previous Versions

In addition to registering the latest version of your SharePoint Online items in Records365 you can choose to register only previous versions of items. This allows you to have a full historical view of the metadata of SharePoint Online items from within Records365. This information will then be available in Records365 and continues to be available in SharePoint Online to your content creators.

To register previous versions of SharePoint Online content in Records365 there are three key parameters;

• PreviousVersionsOnly
• VersionsStartDate
• VersionsEndDate

PreviousVersionOnly, dictates whether previous versions or latest versions only are to be registered. When registering previous versions you can specify which versions to register, as you may only require a certain subset. To limit those registered, the VersionsStartDate and VersionsEndDate parameters need to be supplied. At a minimum the VersionsEndDate needs to be supplied, which limits versions that were created prior to the specified date. Records365 supports registering versions in batches of up to 1000. If a date range specified by the start and end date results in more than 1000 items, the request will be rejected. In such cases we suggest the following;

• fine tune the supplied date time ranges
• remove any versions not required from SharePoint Online

For more information on these parameters, see above Optional Parameters section.