Graph Connectors: Licensing Insights and Copilot Use

Microsoft Graph Connectors are awesome for bringing external (un)structured data into the Microsoft Search experience. So you can use them to enhance the enterprise search capabilities and surface content from third-party sources within Microsoft 365. But their utility goes beyond just search. Graph Connectors also feed data into Microsoft 365 Copilot, enabling AI-driven responses.

As we explored the potential of Graph Connectors, we encountered an old challenge: understanding the licensing requirements for building, testing, and using them 🤷. The available documentation wasn’t entirely clear (at least to me), so we took a deep dive to clarify exactly what is needed at each stage of deployment.

Building and Testing Microsoft Graph Connectors

The good news is that building a Graph Connector is completely free. You need a development environment but any Microsoft 365 tenant will do. So you can use join the Microsoft 365 Developer Program. Getting started is straight forward and documented well.

Alternatively, Microsoft offers out-of-the-box Graph Connectors, which can be configured without writing any code. Examples include connectors for websites, cloud storage, databases, and third-party applications. We used a default connector to index my weblog to setup a quick demo.

Testing Graph Connector Results

Testing the basic functionality of a Graph Connector requires access to Microsoft 365 Search. Any Microsoft 365 license that includes enterprise search (such as an E3 license) will allow you to test how external data is indexed and retrieved. So if you are using the developer tenant with an E3 license, you can fully test the indexing and search integration.

You can see in the image above that the Graph Connector called CloudAppie is returning results from my weblog. Both on the left (Copilot licensed user) or the right (E3 license). This is a great way to test the indexing and search capabilities of your Graph Connector.

Copilot Chat and Graph Connectors

If you want Copilot to retrieve and reason over data indexed by a Graph Connector, a Microsoft 365 Copilot license is required. Without this license, Copilot will not utilize the semantic index, meaning your external data won’t be intelligently analyzed or referenced in Copilot’s responses.

So while even without a Copilot license you can access Microsoft 365 Copilot you will not be able to use the full potential of the Graph Connectors.

If you use a Graph Connector to index a website, you might assume that Copilot Chat will retrieve that data in the same way it retrieves Bing search results. However, this is not the case—Bing results and Graph Connector data are handled separately.

As shown in the image asking the same question with different licenses provide different results. On the left (Copilot licensed user) you can see icons reflecting the result coming from our Graph Connector while on the right (E3 licensed user) the answer is different and the icon clearly states it was a websearch.

Takeaways

We took a few hours to setup both test scenarios to validate and prevent assumptions. Setting up would have taken only an hour but the indexing process takes a little while for showing up. If you’re looking to integrate external content into Microsoft 365, you should look at the Graph Connectors!