SharePoint Sharing-URL AI Skill

Back to index Matthieu Maitre

Organizations accumulate large volumes of knowledge in SharePoint as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office documents. Troubleshouting Guides (TSGs), Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), specs, checklists, etc. are invaluable for AI agents to perform their tasks, as long as they are able to download them and convert them to a format they understand. This post goes over the key steps needed to create a skill that takes a SharePoint sharing URL, downloads the file via Microsoft Graph, and converts it to Markdown using MarkItDown.

Dependencies

Start by adding the following Python packages to requirements.txt (or equivalent):

azure-identity
azure-identity-broker
pywin32 ; sys_platform == "win32"
markitdown[docx]
requests

azure-identity-broker handles broker-based authentication needed when Entra Token Protection is enabled on Microsoft 365.

Clicking the ‘Share’ button in Word/Excel/etc. produces a Sharing URL such as this when the documents are stored in SharePoint:

url = "https://contoso.sharepoint.com/:w:/r/teams/engineering/Shared%20Documents/Report.docx?d=w1234&csf=1"

The Shares API in Microsoft Graph accepts these URLs after encoding them into a sharing token using Base64:

from base64 import urlsafe_b64encode

sharing_token = "u!" + urlsafe_b64encode(url.encode("utf-8")).decode("ascii").rstrip("=")

Authentication

Authenticating using an auth broker and the Microsoft Office client ID (d3590ed6-52b3-4102-aeff-aad2292ab01c) provide the permissions and token protection required to access SharePoint files:

from sys import platform
from azure.identity.broker import InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential

if platform == "win32":
    from win32gui import GetForegroundWindow
    window_handle = GetForegroundWindow()
else:
    from msal import PublicClientApplication
    window_handle = PublicClientApplication.CONSOLE_WINDOW_HANDLE

credential = InteractiveBrowserBrokerCredential(
    client_id="d3590ed6-52b3-4102-aeff-aad2292ab01c",
    parent_window_handle=window_handle,
    use_default_broker_account=True,
)
access_token = credential.get_token("https://graph.microsoft.com/.default").token

Download

Download the file content by passing the sharing token along with the access token to the MS Graph GET /shares/driveItem/content endpoint:

import requests

response = requests.get(
    f"https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/shares/{sharing_token}/driveItem/content",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {access_token}"},
)
with open(path, "wb") as file:
    file.write(response.content)

Behind the scenes, requests automatically follows a 302 Found redirect to a pre-authenticated (i.e. no extra Authorization header needed) download URL provided in the Location header.

Markdown Conversion

MarkItDown converts the downloaded file to Markdown, ready for consumption by AI agents:

markitdown Report.docx > Report.md

GitHub Repo