March 15, 2026

It is a common ask for many organizations. There is a legacy file share with lots of information which is needed to make your AI smart. As the RheinInsights Retrieval Suite is a key enabler for this scenario, we wanted to outline the approach in this short blog post.

File Shares

Generally, we distinguish between file shares which come with permissions from an LDAP or Active Directory and those which do not. The reason is the following. File shares with permissions which are based on LDAP or Active Directory are well suited for security trimming and permission-based retrieval augmented generation (RAG). In this case, users only get answers based on the documents, they have access to in the file share.

RheinInsights Retrieval Suite

Our Retrieval Suite now brings the following building blocks for indexing file share knowledge:

1. File Share Connector: our file share connector continuously indexes all documents from the share and makes sure that the file contents, the access permissions and metadata are up to date in the document index.
   See https://www.rheininsights.com/documentation/9765210.php.

2. Our LDAP connector moreover is able to index the enterprise’s LDAP or Active Directory and enables security trimming and permission-based RAG. The key is that this connector indexes the user-group relationships from the directory service. In turn, when a user searches, the LDAP groups are known and filtering based on the ACLs can take place.
   See https://www.rheininsights.com/documentation/24805419.php.

3. Based on the indexed data, your AI, which may be powered by Squirro, Microsoft Copilot, Open WebUI or our search interface, becomes smart as it can now access all file share knowledge.

4. Last but not least, as file share links (generally) cannot be opened from a browser, our Suite brings (permission- and browser-based) document previews so that users can easily access the document and read it without the need to manually browse to the file share location.
   See https://www.rheininsights.com/documentation/209879041.php

Overall, this is how we straight-forwardly enable bringing in up-to-date knowledge from file shares, DFS or Netapp to your enterprise AI.