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Box overview

The Box connector for Glean allows Glean to fetch and index content from Box, ensuring that users can search and access documents for which they have authorized permissions.

  • Authentication: Glean requires the Box admin to authenticate Glean via OAuth2 during the setup of the Glean crawler

  • Data storage: All data is stored within the customer's cloud account, ensuring no data leaves the customer's environment

API usage​

  • Standard API: Glean uses Box's standard API for Box to ingest all data

Integration features​

  • Content captured: Glean indexes Box folders, files, Box Notes, and file comments, along with their permissions.

  • Permissions enforcement: Glean respects all user access permissions, ensuring users only see search results for documents they can access. When a user clicks on a search result, they are taken to the Box web application, which enforces the permission.

Supported versions​

There are no specific version limitations of the Box connector.

Authentication mechanism​

During configuration, Glean initiates an authorization flow with Box to obtain both a refresh token and an access token for the customer’s Box account. The access token, which is used to make API calls, has a limited validity period. Glean therefore runs a scheduled refresh process that uses the refresh token from the initial authorization to obtain new access tokens as needed.

Requirements​

Technical requirements​

To use the Box connector, you must have the following:

  • A Box enterprise account.
  • A Box Admin account that can authorize an OAuth 2.0 application for your enterprise.
  • A Glean deployment with access to the Admin console to add and configure connectors.

Glean connects to Box via Box’s REST APIs over HTTPS and stores indexed data in your organization’s Glean deployment.

Permission requirements​

To configure the connector end to end, you must be the following:

  • A Box Admin for the relevant enterprise (to authorize the integration and grant required scopes).
  • A Glean admin with permissions to add and configure connectors.
  • Co-admins are not supported. Co-admins may lack the necessary privileges (e.g., managing users, running reports) to provide full content access, which can prevent Glean from crawling all expected information.

Notification suppression (optional)​

  • Glean uses Box’s file download API as part of the crawl. If your Box organization is configured to send email alerts for suspicious download activity, Glean recommends working with Box Support to suppress notifications for the client ID used by the Glean integration.
  • In addition, contact Glean Support to request the required backend configuration change for notification suppression. This additional step is required to fully suppress crawler-generated notification emails.
  • If you do not suppress these notifications, users across your Box organization may receive unnecessary download alerts generated by the crawler.

Items crawled​

Content​

For Box, Glean indexes the following content and associated permissions:

  • Folders
  • Files (e.g. slides, word documents, etc.)
  • Box Notes
  • Comments on the files

Identity​

  • Users: Information about users within the Box
  • Groups: Details about groups within Box

Activity​

  • Adds: New files or folders added to Box.
  • Updates: Modifications made to existing files or folders.
  • Permissions changes: Changes in file or folder sharing permissions.
  • Deletions: Files or folders that have been deleted.
  • View activity: Events indicating when a file or folder has been via Glean.

The activity crawl operates with the following configurations:

  • Incremental activity crawls: These are performed every 1 minutes to capture recent changes.
  • Full activity crawls: These are conducted periodically to ensure all activity data is up-to-date.

Rate limits​

Glean is restricted to a maximum of 16 QPS per individual user. Glean distributes all users across 10 distinct queues for an initial maximum of 160 QPS.

Update frequency​

Content updates for the Box connector in Glean can happen quite rapidly, depending on the type of update and the configuration settings. Here are the key areas:

  • Activity reports: Adds, updates, and permissions changes are crawled every minute. This means that any new files, modifications to existing files, or changes in sharing permissions are detected and processed quickly.
  • Identity crawls for User Group Memberships: Modifications to group memberships are detected by the identity crawl, which operates hourly. This mechanism ensures that updates concerning user groups and their corresponding permissions are promptly reflected.
  • Incremental crawls: These occur every 10 minutes to provide additional reliability beyond the minute-by-minute activity reports.
  • Full crawls: The frequency of full crawls can be configured, but they are generally less frequent than incremental crawls at 28 days

Changes in data must be crawled, processed, and indexed before the data is reflected in the UI. Actual time may vary depending on the number of changes and corpus size. For the most up-to-date crawler refresh information, please refer to Glean's Crawling Strategy

Crawl limitations​

  • Box has a per-user limit for API requests that we utilize for crawling. Glean runs into issues with this when customers have a large number of documents owned by a single service account. This can occur when customers do large migrations from on premise to cloud. Box itself recommends using a single service account.

  • The user setting up the connector must be a Box Admin. Co-admins do not have the necessary access permissions, which means they cannot access other co-admins items, leading to incomplete crawls.

Glean does not currently index:

  • Box web links
  • Custom metadata set on folders/files
  • Favorites collections

Content configuration​

The rules below should be used MINIMALLY to preserve the enterprise search experience, as most end-users expect to find all content. Most customers do not apply any rules or apply exclusion rules sparingly for sensitive folders.

Exclusion (redlisting) options​

Glean provides several options for excluding content from the data crawl, which excludes data from search and chat results.

  • Users: Exclude content belonging to specific users from being crawled.
  • Folders: Exclude content belonging to specific folders from being crawled.
  • See how to exclude content.
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