Best Practices on setting up a public facing Copilot to use a SharePoint site

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Posted on by RH-30102146-0

I’ve created a Copilot that consumes my pubic website, and would like to embed it in my website using the “Custom Website” channel. I also added a Sharepoint site as a knowledge source, but the Copilot is having problems consuming the data.
ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/knowledge-add-sharepoint

I’m looking for some advice on best practices on how to achieve file consumption from my SharePoint site.
Here’s what I tried:

I tried to set my SharePoint site permissions as “Anonymous”, but that option is not available. It looks like this has been disabled in our organization due to security concerns.
I changed the Copilot authentication to “Authenticate Manually”, and deselected the “Require users to sign in” slider.

but some users are reporting access errors

For the users that didn’t get an error, they still couldn’t reference the data.
ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/configuration-end-user-authentication
ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/configuration-authentication-azure-ad
I directly uploaded files as a Copilot knowledge base. This works finer very targeted files, but it limits the knowledge that anyone else can add.

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Vinoth Selvam 1,590 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi RH-30102146-0,

Yes, since you need to embed the chatbot into custom website and also use Sharepoint knowledge source, you need to se the Copilot authentication to “Authenticate Manually”. But you might need to Enable requires users to sign-in option.

Since your org has some security policies, sign in must be required.

This setup needs to be done properly with proper API permissions.You have provided permission for

Sites.Read.All

Files.Read.All

Kindly refer to the below post to setup the manual Authentication.

https://msdcentral.site/copilot-studio-how-to-configure-manual-authentication/

Thanks.

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RH-30102146-0 4 on at

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Thank you for your response @Vinoth. I reviewed and followed your article, but my Copilot still required me to authenticate. My goal is to use a SharePoint site as a knowledge base for a public facing copilot, and not require authentication.

When I add my knowledge source, it tells me that the data is only available to authenticated users

The Learn More link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/nlu-generative-answers-sharepoint-onedrive provides a way to manually authenticate

but the copilot still prompts a user to authenticate, or throws an authentication error.

Do you have this working in your environment?

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