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Discovery

Discovery is how Slide finds out what's in a Microsoft 365 tenant. During discovery, Slide looks for users, shared mailboxes, and other resources, and keeps the resource list up to date as people join and leave the organization.

When Discovery Runs

  • After setup: Discovery runs as soon as you activate protection for a tenant.
  • On a schedule: Discovery runs automatically about once a day for every protected tenant.
  • On demand: Open the tenant and click Discover Now to run discovery right away. While it's running, you'll see its progress, and you can click Cancel Discovery to stop it.

Discovery doesn't run while a tenant is paused.

What Discovery Finds

  • Users: Licensed users in the tenant. Users without a Microsoft 365 license are skipped.
  • Shared Mailboxes: Shared mailboxes are found whether or not they have a license.
  • Sites: SharePoint sites. Personal OneDrive sites are part of their user instead.
  • Groups: Microsoft 365 groups, along with their SharePoint site and Team.
  • Entra: One Entra resource per tenant, covering the tenant's directory.

If the tenant doesn't include a Microsoft 365 service at all, such as SharePoint Online, Slide skips that type of resource and discovery still completes without an error. For example, a tenant without SharePoint Online won't have any sites in Slide.

For each resource it finds, Slide also adds its applications, such as a user's Mail and OneDrive. A OneDrive that doesn't exist yet in Microsoft 365 (the user has never signed in to it) shows as Not provisioned yet until discovery finds it.

What Happens to Discovered Resources

  • New resources: If Auto-Protect is enabled, new resources are protected and backed up on the tenant's schedule. Otherwise they're added as Not protected, and you can protect them yourself.
  • Removed resources: If a protected user is deleted from Microsoft 365 or loses their license, the resource becomes Archived. Backups stop, but its recovery points are kept and follow the tenant's retention.
  • Returning resources: If an archived resource shows up again (e.g. a user's license is restored), Slide reactivates it and resumes backups.

Slide never unprotects a resource on its own.

Discovery Results

The tenant's Overview tab shows when discovery last ran, whether it succeeded, and when it'll run next. The Recent Discovery Attempts section lists how many resources each run created, updated, archived, reactivated, or left unchanged.

If discovery fails for some resource types, Slide tells you which ones and why, for example "Discovery failed for Users (permission denied)". Permission errors usually mean Slide's access to the tenant has changed. See Re-Authorizing a Tenant.