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Choose an enterprise knowledge platform by proving that it can retrieve the right current information from the systems your people use, respect each user’s source permissions, show where answers came from, and keep agent actions under control. Connector totals and architecture diagrams are only starting points: a realistic pilot with your own users, content, and workflows is what reveals whether the platform fits.
Start with the work your agents need to do
Before comparing products, list the questions employees want to ask and the work an agent may be expected to perform. For example, “How do I file an expense report?” is a natural-language question an agent could answer by finding an organization’s policy and process documents. Whether it can give a reliable answer depends on the quality, currency, accessibility, and traceability of those sources—not just on the model.
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For each use case, record the systems that contain relevant information, who should be able to see it, how quickly it changes, and whether the agent only needs to read or also needs to act. This gives vendors a concrete brief and keeps demonstrations focused on the environment you actually have.
Check repository and connector fit
A connector count is not a coverage assessment. Microsoft reports more than 100 Copilot connectors on its FAQ page, while Glean reports more than 275 app connectors on its Agent Governance page. These are vendor-published figures; the pages do not state a year for the counts. Neither figure establishes that a platform supports the specific content, metadata, permission model, update behavior, or workflow your organization requires.
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#1 Best Overall
Build an inventory of required repositories and test each one against the same questions:
- Can the connector retrieve the content types employees need, including attachments or other relevant formats?
- Can it carry the metadata you need for filtering, such as source, location, date, document type, or sensitivity?
- Does it represent direct and inherited access rules, groups, guests, and restricted locations correctly?
- How are new, changed, and deleted items reflected, and what happens if a sync or retrieval fails?
- Does the use case require read-only access, live retrieval, or a write-back action?
Confirm connector behavior with the vendor for the particular source and configuration. A connector’s presence on a list does not prove that all of these capabilities are available for that source.
Compare retrieval architectures on operational needs
Platforms can make organizational knowledge available through indexed, live, or hybrid retrieval. Each approach has operational implications for freshness, administration, filters, and failure handling. The vendor documentation describes architecture, not comparative answer accuracy or reliability.
Rank #2
| Approach documented by the vendor | What the documentation describes | What to verify in your environment |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365-centered retrieval | Microsoft’s Retrieval API retrieves in place from SharePoint, OneDrive, and Copilot connectors, avoiding a separately managed index for those supported sources. Microsoft also documents retrieval filters for the API. | Which of your sources are supported; how quickly edits and deletions become retrievable; which filters and metadata are available; and what the API returns when a source is unavailable or a query cannot be answered. |
| Cross-application platform such as Glean | Glean describes connectors feeding its search index and knowledge graph, alongside live-fetch and hybrid retrieval patterns. | Which sources are indexed versus fetched live for your configuration; the resulting freshness and latency; how permissions and metadata flow through each path; and how the platform behaves if a connector or live source fails. |
Ask each vendor to demonstrate a recently changed document, a deleted document, a conflicting pair of sources, and a query constrained by source or other relevant metadata. Check that the answer cites material a reviewer can open and inspect. Do not treat an architectural description as a benchmark of answer quality.
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Make permission enforcement a pass-or-fail requirement
An agent must not reveal, summarize, quote, or act on information a user cannot access in the source system. Microsoft documents that SharePoint agent responses depend on each user’s permissions to the agent’s data sources. Glean documents synchronized source permissions, with permission mirroring dependent on connector support and correct configuration. These vendor descriptions are not substitutes for testing your own identity and source setup.
Ask whether retrieval happens in the user’s identity, mirrors source access-control lists, or uses a service identity with a separate policy-enforcement layer. Then test using real or representative identities, including:
- Users with direct access and users relying on inherited access.
- Users whose group membership changes during the test.
- A user whose access has just been revoked.
- Guests and users who cannot access a restricted site or document.
Run the same questions as an allowed and a denied user. Confirm that denied users cannot obtain restricted passages through a summary, citation, related result, or agent action. Include permission changes and revoked access in the acceptance criteria rather than assuming that a successful initial setup will remain correct.
Keep agent actions more restricted than agent search
Searching and answering are not the same risk as changing a record, sending information, or triggering a consequential operation. Begin with read-only retrieval. Add actions only when a clear use case justifies the additional permissions and operational risk.
For every proposed action, document the operation, credential, destination, permitted scope, reversibility, and expected result. Give tools only the permissions they need. Require human approval for consequential operations, and retain logs that allow administrators to review what an agent attempted and what happened.
Microsoft’s agent guidance recommends identifying actions that write or change external data and carefully governing sensitive operations, including human intervention where appropriate. Glean documents administrator controls over tool availability and whether configured write tools run automatically or require approval. In a pilot, test both the approval and denial paths, not only a successful action.
Verify governance across every product surface
Before deployment, establish who can create, discover, share, publish, approve, restrict, audit, and disable agents and connectors. Also determine how the platform fits your requirements for data loss prevention, retention, data residency, model-provider handling, incident response, and agent shutdown.
Check the scope of each administrative control in the applications where employees will use agents. Microsoft documents a current limitation: blocking an agent from Copilot Chat does not yet block its use in OneDrive, SharePoint, or Teams. Confirm the behavior and available controls in the target environment; a block or disable setting in one surface may not govern the others.
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Run a pilot that measures quality and failure modes
Use a fixed set of representative employee questions with known source documents and known allowed and denied users. Include ordinary requests as well as questions the system should not answer confidently. Microsoft’s agent guidance recommends comparing responses with and without knowledge sources, testing irrelevant and edge questions, trying the agent across apps, and checking confirmation flows.
Define acceptance measures before the pilot so a polished demo does not become the success criterion. Useful measures include:
- Task completion and user effort.
- Grounded-answer rate and citation correctness.
- Retrieval coverage for the required sources.
- Latency and behavior when a source is unavailable.
- Permission failures, including whether restricted content is exposed.
- Action errors and whether confirmations work as intended.
Test stale or conflicting documents, incomplete questions, irrelevant queries, and cases where no suitable source exists. Record not only whether the final response looks plausible, but whether the supporting evidence is relevant, current, and accessible to that user. The vendor documentation cited here does not establish an independent cross-vendor performance benchmark or buyer outcome statistic.
Compare the full operating cost, not just the headline license
Estimate the ongoing cost of the whole operating model: required subscriptions and user licenses, connector or capacity charges, implementation, identity integration, content cleanup, administration, evaluation, and future migration. Include the effort needed to keep sources, access rules, agent instructions, and test cases in working order.
Microsoft says Copilot Search itself is included with a Microsoft Copilot license, while some advanced connector capabilities may add cost or require separate licensing. Microsoft’s Retrieval API documentation says it is available at no extra cost with the Copilot add-on license and describes pay-as-you-go consumption as preview for some cases. These terms may vary by geography, capacity, contract, and product changes; confirm current details directly with the vendor. Exact contract pricing is not established here.
Use a decision gate rather than a connector-count contest
Advance a platform only if it can meet your requirements across source coverage, permission fidelity, freshness, provenance, administration, and action controls. For each must-have use case, capture the evidence from a realistic test and name the unresolved risk. If a critical repository cannot be represented safely, or a control cannot be enforced across the surfaces employees will use, treat that as a blocker rather than balancing it against a large connector total.
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