AI for SharePoint& OneDrive — chat with your files, cited.
Sidenote is a Chrome extension that reads your SharePoint and OneDrive files — Word docs, PDFs, decks — and answers questions about them, with a citation on every answer that takes you to the exact passage. Delegated, read-only, no Copilot licence required.
Everything's in SharePoint. Nothing's findable.
The runbook, the policy, the architecture decision, last quarter's deck — all there, all real, all buried under nested folders and three near-identical versions of the same file. SharePoint search ranks them about the same, and the deck's answer is sitting in a speaker note nobody opens.
Sidenote reads the file you're on and answers the question — then shows you the passage it used, so you can tell at a glance whether it's still true.
How Sidenote works on SharePoint & OneDrive.
What teams ask SharePoint — and how Sidenote answers.
- “What's the rollback procedure?”Sidenote reads the runbook in the doc library and quotes the exact step — not the superseded version filed next to it.
- “Why did we choose this architecture?”Decision records buried in a Word doc surface in seconds, with the trade-off paragraph quoted back to you.
- “What did the QBR deck actually say?”Sidenote reads the slides and the speaker notes, and cites the slide the number came from. Decks stop being write-only.
- “What's our policy on data retention?”It finds the clause in the policy document and quotes it, with the date it was last reviewed.
- “Who owns this process, and how do I escalate?”Reads the process page and the escalation matrix together, citing each source file.
- “I'm new — where do I even start?”New joiners query the team site directly instead of hunting through nested folders nobody can navigate.
Delegated, read-only, and only what you open.
Sidenote uses delegated Microsoft Graph access — it acts as you, sees only what your account can see, and only reads a file when you open it. There is no tenant-wide crawl and no third-party copy of every document. On tenants that require it, an administrator grants the read-only permissions once; after that, each person works within their own access.
Common questions about Sidenote for SharePoint & OneDrive.
Do we need a SharePoint admin to set this up?
Each person signs in to Microsoft themselves and grants Sidenote read-only access to the files they open. On most tenants that's all it takes. On locked-down Microsoft 365 tenants that disable user consent, an administrator may need to approve the read-only Graph permissions once for the organisation — a standard one-time consent, not an app to deploy into SharePoint.
What access does Sidenote get?
Delegated, read-only Microsoft Graph access to the files and sites you can already see — scoped to your own account. Sidenote reads a file only when you open it. There's no write access, and no background sync of your tenant.
Can it read files on private SharePoint sites and OneDrive?
Yes — anything your own Microsoft account can open. SharePoint document libraries, OneDrive files, and SharePoint site pages all work. If your account can't open it, neither can Sidenote; permissions stay exactly where Microsoft 365 put them.
Which file types are supported?
Word documents, PDFs and PowerPoint decks (including speaker notes), plus SharePoint site pages. Excel is intentionally not supported — chatting over a flattened grid of numbers invites confidently-wrong answers, which is the opposite of what Sidenote is for.
Is our content used to train AI models?
No. Anthropic and Voyage AI both run with no-training defaults on the API tiers Sidenote uses, and Sidenote never fine-tunes models on user content. Files are used only to answer your own questions, stored in a UK (eu-west-2) region with row-level security isolating every account.
How is this different from Microsoft Copilot?
Copilot is Microsoft's own AI, sold as a per-user licence and operated inside Microsoft 365. Sidenote is a lightweight per-user extension that works on SharePoint and OneDrive without a Copilot licence — and across everything else you read too — grounding each answer in a citation you can click to the source passage. The two can coexist.
Make SharePoint answer back.
Add Sidenote to Chrome, sign in with Microsoft read-only, open a file, and ask. No Copilot licence. Free tier forever, 7-day Pro trial — no card required.
Delegated read-only Graph access · Works with SharePoint Online & OneDrive