Claude With Microsoft 365: Outlook, Teams and SharePoint

Yes, Claude connects to Microsoft 365 through a connector Anthropic builds and hosts. It can search and read SharePoint and OneDrive files, Outlook mail and calendar, and Teams chats, channels and meeting information, always with your own Microsoft permissions. Out of the box it only reads; sending mail, changing calendar events, writing files and posting in Teams work only when your administrators turn write actions on. It is available on every Claude plan, but it needs a work or school Microsoft account, and a Microsoft Entra Global Administrator has to grant consent for your organisation first. Microsoft To Do is not part of it; that is covered in Microsoft To Do and MCP.

What it can read, service by service

Anthropic’s Microsoft 365 connector documentation↗ (opens in a new tab) sets out the access per service. All of it is delegated: Claude acts as you and sees only what your account can already see.

• SharePoint and OneDrive: search and analyse documents across the sites and libraries you can open, including team sites, communication sites and shared OneDrive folders.
• Outlook mail: search threads and read message content and metadata, filtered by date, sender or subject. It covers your primary mailbox, its Archive folder and shared mailboxes you can access.
• Outlook calendar: review meetings, attendees and summaries, to prepare for one or catch up on one you missed.
• Teams: read chat messages and channel discussions where you are a participant, and meeting information such as summaries and attendance.

The connector’s directory listing↗ (opens in a new tab) names its server, https://microsoft365.mcp.claude.com/mcp, and its read tools, among them sharepoint_search, outlook_email_search, outlook_calendar_search, find_meeting_availability and chat_message_search. It is an MCP server like any other, run by Anthropic.

Read-only, or write?

Read-only unless your administrators decide otherwise. According to Anthropic’s guide to connecting to Microsoft 365↗ (opens in a new tab), with write tools on Claude can draft, send and organise email, including categories, inbox rules and automatic replies; create, update and delete calendar events; create and update files in OneDrive and SharePoint; and send a Teams chat message, post or reply in a channel, or start a chat.

• Each Teams write tool is turned on separately, and sending a chat message or posting in a channel always asks you to confirm first.
• Email Claude sends carries a header marking it as agent-initiated. Teams messages, file writes and calendar changes are not currently tagged.
• Write tools cannot handle attachments: Claude cannot send, forward or draft an email with one.
• Write tools are subject to per-user limits, and Claude cannot change Teams settings or permissions at all.

Admin consent in Microsoft Entra

Two sets of administrators are involved. On Claude Team and Enterprise plans, a Claude Owner or Primary Owner adds the connector once under Organization settings, Connectors, and can restrict which members use it. In every case, including Free, Pro and Max, a Microsoft Entra Global Administrator grants one-time consent for the tenant. Anthropic’s administrator guide, set up the Microsoft 365 connector↗ (opens in a new tab), walks through both.

• In the Entra admin center the connector appears under Enterprise applications as “M365 MCP Server for Claude”, where you can review and revoke its permissions.
• When Anthropic adds a permission later, such as the ones write actions need, a Global Administrator or Application Administrator approves it once for the tenant through an admin consent link. Disconnecting and reconnecting does not add it, because Microsoft does not show the consent screen again.
• Write actions are switched on in the connector’s configuration in Claude, for everyone or, on Enterprise, for a subset of users through roles.
• Members can also turn individual tools off for themselves under Customize, Connectors, for example keeping document search while switching off email.

Plans, apps and Cowork

The connector is available on Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise. Once connected, it also works in Claude for iOS and Android. In a chat you switch it on from the + menu, under Connectors.

Claude Cowork, on the paid plans, uses the same connectors. You choose which ones a task may use from the + menu or Customize, Connectors, and set each tool to always allow, needs approval, or blocked. Keep the tools that send or delete on needs approval. For tasks to try, see Claude Cowork examples.

Do not confuse the connector with Claude for Microsoft 365↗ (opens in a new tab), which puts Claude inside Excel, PowerPoint, Word and Outlook as an add-in. Anthropic says the Excel, PowerPoint and Word versions are generally available on paid plans and the Outlook one is in beta. The add-ins work on the document in front of you; the connector searches across your tenant from Claude.

Limits worth knowing

• File types: Word, Excel and PowerPoint, including the older .doc, .xls and .ppt, PDF, and plain-text files such as .txt, .md, .csv and .json. Other files appear in search but cannot be opened.
• OneNote is not supported. Export pages to Word or PDF if you need them.
• Email search does not cover the separate Online Archive mailbox, so mail a retention policy has moved there will not appear.
• SharePoint search runs across the whole tenant; you cannot limit the connector to certain sites. Name the site in your prompt instead.
• Recently uploaded files can take time to become searchable.
• It works on demand only: it does not run background searches or watch your inbox.

Security

Anthropic’s Microsoft 365 connector security guide↗ (opens in a new tab) describes the connector as an Anthropic-hosted proxy: your documents and mail stay in your tenant and are fetched only during a request, without file content being cached. It never sees your password. Access and refresh tokens are encrypted while cached, and refresh tokens expire after 90 days without use. Tool results that become part of a saved chat are kept with that chat, and anyone the chat is shared with can see them.

• Delegated access cannot exceed yours, but it is all of yours. If you can open every HR folder, so can Claude on your behalf.
• Mail and chat are other people’s words. An email written to steer an assistant is a classic case of indirect prompt injection, so keep write tools on approval and be wary of acting on instructions found in a message.
• Access shows up in Microsoft Entra sign-in logs and can be monitored in Microsoft Purview. Revoking the application in Entra takes effect for everyone at once.
• Keep write actions off until you have a reason to turn them on, and turn them on for the people who need them.

Prompts that show what it can do

• “Find the latest version of the vendor contract in the Legal site and list the renewal terms.”
• “Summarise the emails about the office move from the last two weeks, with who said what.”
• “What was decided in the Teams channel for the website project since Monday?”
• “Schedule a 30-minute sync with the design team next week.” This one needs write tools; without them, Claude can still read the calendars but not book.

From a Teams thread to the board

The third prompt above is where most teams lose things. Claude can find what was decided in a thread, but a thread is not a record: the decision scrolls away and the work it creates is nobody’s. Connect fenbs to Claude as well, by adding fenbs.ai as a connector, and ask it to turn what it found into tasks. With fenbs_add_decision it can record the decision on the board’s Decisions page, with the person who made it named as the decider; an assistant never decides. The tasks sit in the lanes To Do, Next Up, In Progress and Completed, and every change it makes is kept in the board’s history.