Connect SharePoint

Connecting SharePoint lets Mereon read files from document libraries you choose and turn them into training content. Mereon re-reads those libraries on a schedule, so when a policy changes in SharePoint the version your people learn from changes with it.

Two people are usually involved, and they are often not the same person. A Mereon owner or admin sets up the connection and chooses what to import. A Microsoft 365 Global Administrator approves Mereon’s access to the tenant once, at the start. If you are not the Microsoft 365 administrator, send them this page before you begin.

What Mereon asks for, and what it does with it

Mereon requests one Microsoft Graph permission, Sites.Read.All, as an application permission that an administrator approves once for the whole organization. There is no per-user sign-in to maintain, which matters for a content sync: a connection tied to one person’s account stops working when that person leaves, and training content that silently stops updating is worse than training content that was never connected.

Be clear with your security team about what that permission means. It grants read access to every SharePoint site in the tenant. Which content Mereon actually reads and imports is governed by the selections you make in Mereon, not by the permission itself.

Mereon never writes to SharePoint. Imported documents are read-only inside Mereon, so the copy in your library stays the single source of truth.

If tenant-wide read access is a blocker

Mereon can work under Sites.Selected, where your administrator grants access to named sites only. Site browsing is unavailable under that permission because Microsoft provides no way to list the sites an app has been granted, so you identify each site by pasting its URL instead. Ask your Microsoft 365 administrator to grant Mereon access per site, and use the site URL when you add a selection. Mereon needs no configuration change to work this way.

Connect your tenant

1. Start the connection in Mereon

   Connecting SharePoint asks for your Microsoft 365 domain, such as contoso.com or contoso.onmicrosoft.com. Mereon uses it to identify your tenant and to make sure the approval that comes back belongs to the tenant you asked for.

2. Approve access in Microsoft

   Microsoft asks a Global Administrator to review the permission and approve it for the organization. Approving returns you to Mereon with the connection active.

   If someone other than the administrator started this, the administrator needs to complete the approval in the same browser session that began it.

3. Choose what to import

   Nothing imports until you make a selection, which is a document library or a folder inside one. Mereon shows how many files a selection matches before you save it, so you can confirm the scope is what you expected.

Choosing what to import

A selection covers everything beneath it unless you narrow it. Choosing a library imports that whole library, and choosing a folder imports that folder and its subfolders. You can also pick individual folders within a library when only part of it is training material.

Each selection carries its own visibility. A selection can be available to everyone in your organization, or restricted to specific teams, which lets one library serve both a general handbook and a set of documents only the safety team should see. You can also restrict a selection by file type, or to files modified after a given date when a library holds years of history you do not want to import.

Selections can overlap. A selection covering a whole library and another covering one folder inside it will not import the same file twice.

What imports, and what does not

Mereon imports PDF, Word (.docx), plain text, and Markdown files up to 25 MB.

Files outside that set are skipped with the reason shown next to them, so a library full of spreadsheets and presentations imports its documents and tells you what it left behind. PowerPoint and Excel files are not supported yet.

Two cases are worth knowing because the reason can look surprising:

• Files protected by a sensitivity label that encrypts them cannot be read, even though Microsoft reports their name and size normally. Mereon skips them rather than importing unreadable content, and says so.
• Files saved in an older Office format under a modern extension, such as a .doc renamed to .docx, fail the same check for the same reason.

Keeping content in sync

Mereon re-reads your selections daily and applies what changed. A new file in a selected folder is imported, an edited file replaces the earlier version, and a file deleted in SharePoint has its Mereon copy removed. Moving a file between selected folders keeps it as the same document, so lessons and references built on it stay intact.

When a sync would remove a large share of a selection’s content at once, Mereon holds those removals instead of applying them and flags the selection for review. A permissions change or a folder moved by mistake can make a library look empty, and re-importing content is cheap compared with deleting training material that people depend on. Once the library reads normally again, the selection returns to its usual state on its own.

Troubleshooting

The connection did not complete. Wait a few minutes and connect again. Microsoft approvals take a short time to propagate across their systems, and an approval that is still settling can fail on first use.

Confirm what you are approving. Before approving, check that the application name and publisher domain shown belong to Mereon, and that the permission requested is read access to SharePoint sites and nothing more. An approval request that asks for write access, or that arrives from anywhere other than a connection you started in Mereon, should be declined.

Files are missing after a sync. Every file Mereon declined is listed with the reason, which is usually an unsupported type, a file over the size limit, or a file it could not read. Selections also show a count when you save them, so comparing that count against what you expected tells you whether the selection or the files are the problem.

Nothing has synced recently. Check whether your administrator’s approval is still in place. Revoking Mereon’s access in Microsoft stops the sync, and Mereon notifies your organization’s admins when that happens.