Azure Authentication for OneDrive

By integrating with Microsoft Azure, Shinydocs Cognitive Suite can operate with Microsoft applications, such as OneDrive — maintaining secure and compliant access to cloud applications with policy-based access controls.

The following document describes how to enable Azure authentication for OneDrive.

Table of Contents

Register Shinydocs Software with Azure

The first step of the process is to register your Shinydocs software with Azure, so that it can access OneDrive files. If Shinydocs is already listed as a registered application, skip this step.

Step by step:

Open Microsoft Azure. In the upper left corner dropdown menu, navigate to Azure Active Directory.

From the sidebar menu, select App registrations

Select + New registration

Enter a name for the application. In this case, we used “Shinydocs” as the application name.
Select who, within your organization, can use or access the application. In most cases, the first option (Single tenant) will be selected (see below).
Enter a Redirect URl. This is optional at this point, but is required for most authentication scenarios. In this example, we used “https://myapp.com/auth”.
Select Register to continue…

Congratulations! You have successfully registered Shinydocs software with Microsoft Azure.

Permission to Access OneDrive Content

Now, it’s time to apply permissions to access content within OneDrive.

From the sidebar menu, select API permissions
Select APIs my organizations uses
In the search box, enter Microsoft Graph
Select Microsoft Graph from the list
Select Application permissions and apply the Directory.Read.All and the Files.Read.All permissions:

Select Add permissions at the bottom of the page.
The API permissions should now be updated to included OneDrive.
Next, select Grant admin consent for Shinydocs Corporation.
Select Yes to grant consent for the requested permissions for all accounts in Shinydocs Corporation.

At the top of the page, there will be a notification that admin consent for the requested permissions was successfully granted.

Certificates & secrets

📔 A client secret only needs to be generated once for the Cognitive Suite. If one has already been created, skip to the next step.

From the sidebar menu, select Certificates & secrets
Select +New client secret

Enter a description for the new client secret. In this case, we used “ShinydocsAppSecret”.
Select an expiry date based on your company protocol.
Select Add.

Save your secret

The secret only needs to be generated once for all Shinydocs products.
The first time it is generated, copy the Secret Value immediately and save it as this value will be hidden if the page reloads. Store it in a safe place for re-use when installing other Shinydocs products.

In the left hand menu, open Overview
Record and save the following information in a safe place for configuring Shinydocs Cognitive Suite and for re-use when installing other Shinydocs products.

Azure AD® secret value: ___________________________________________________
Azure AD® client (application) ID: ___________________________________________________
Azure AD® tenant (directory) ID: ___________________________________________________
Azure AD® redirect URL: ___________________________________________________

Note: The secret, client ID and tenant ID will be used within the Microsoft OneDrive Source Settings file within the Cognitive Toolkit configuration.

Note: If you plan to install Shinydocs Discovery Search, the secret, client ID, tenant ID, and the redirect URL will be required for configuring Azure AD® for Shinydocs Discovery Search. For more information, see Configuring Microsoft Online Settings.

Configure the Shinydocs Cognitive Suite

Navigate to the Cognitive Suite download provided by Shinydocs: shinydocs-cognitive-toolkit-yyyy-mm-dd (X.X.X).zip.
Open the External Resources folder
Open the Sample Source Settings folder
Using a text editor such as Notepad++, open the onedrive.json file and edit the code to reflect the items saved in the previous step:

CODE

{
  "comments" : [
    "Please don't forget to encrypt your sensitive fields with the cognitive toolkit"
    ],
  "sourceType" : "Onedrive",
  "sourceConnectionSettings" : {
    "app-id": "",
    "secret-key": "",
    "tenant-id": ""
  }
}

Save the changes.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully enabled Azure authentication for OneDrive!

Token Authorization

If you plan to configure Discovery Search for integration with Microsoft Online applications, you must configure the tokens that will be issued from the authorizing endpoint. Please ensure Token Authorization is configured in Azure AD® as described in Preparing for Integration of Microsoft Online Applications with Discovery Search.