Sources · Company source · export guide
Export Microsoft 365 (Purview) into a Company Brain — headers only
For Microsoft shops the mail archive comes out of Purview eDiscovery. The brain treats it exactly like an mbox: people and relationship signal from the headers, nothing from the bodies.
What a Microsoft 365 export holds — and what the brain makes of it
An eDiscovery Manager runs a content search in the Purview compliance portal and exports the results — .eml files plus a results CSV. The brain builder reads correspondents as people and per-person frequency and recency as relationship strength, from headers only. Bodies are never accessed.
Beside a Microsoft Teams message report and the CRM export, this gives a Microsoft-based company the same relationship map a Google-based one gets from Workspace and mbox.
Get the export
How to export your Microsoft 365 data
The exact clicks, as they are today. Platforms move menus; the engine’s source docs are updated when they do.
- 01
Purview compliance portal → eDiscovery → Content search
- 02
Export results (requires the eDiscovery Manager role)
- 03
Drop the archive on Microsoft 365 in Studio’s Sources — or tell Claude Code or Codex “build my brain from this”. The source is detected by itself, even inside a combined archive.
Then, next month
An export is a snapshot. Drop a newer one and press Update: your edits and _notes/ are kept, and the update report says what changed.
Then ask it
What you can ask a brain built from Microsoft 365
Examples, not promises: the answer is whatever your notes hold, and every answer cites the notes it came from. The more exports you add, the more these questions cross sources.
- Who on our side writes most to our top ten accounts?
- Which external relationships are held by one person only?
- Which correspondents appear in mail but in no CRM record?
limitRequires the eDiscovery Manager role and a scoped search; the export reflects the search, not the whole tenant.
Good to know
The honest answers.
Does it read message bodies? No. Headers only — the same rule as the mbox source; the content of an .eml is never parsed beyond its envelope.
Do we need an E5 licence? eDiscovery content search is part of Purview; which plans include it is Microsoft’s call. The brain reads the exported files, not the tenant.
Start
Your company’s exports already exist. Turn them into a brain.
Free and open source on your own machine. Or hand us the exports — done-for-you onboarding is in early access.
Second Brain Studio · Mac (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux · free · MIT
Just looking? Open Studio in your browser — two demo brains, nothing to install