Polinode

Passive Data

Please note that the Passive Data Module needs to be enabled for your organization before you will be able to use it. There is an additional cost associated with this module that depends on the number of employees that you will be activating it for.

The Passive Data Module is desinged to make it easy to conduct Passive Organizational Network Analysis with the Polinode platform. Generally an Account Manager from Polinode will work with you to configure and setup the Passive Data Add-On.

Data Sources

We offer a number of Data Sources in the first tab:

  1. Office 365 Directory: When setting up the Office 365 data sources initially, you need to first connect to the Directory. This provides Polinode with a list of either all the employees in your organization, of, if setup just those employees in a Directory Group that you have setup. We use this data to collect metadata for these emails, e.g. email and calendar metadata. Once the Office 365 Directory is setup, you will be able to connect to any or all of the Email, Calendar and People data sources for Office 365.
    When you setup Office 365 Directory as a source you have the ability to specify one or more Office 365 Directory Groups for which to activate it. If none is specified then it will be active for everyone in the organization.
  2. Office 365 Email: Once connected, the Office 365 Email data source allows Polinode to collect and store email metadata for the employees that you have configured via the directory integration. Polinode will then retrieve this metadata on a daily basis.
  3. Office 365 Calendar: Similar to Office 365 Email metadata, this data source allows Polinode to collect Office 365 Calendar metadata on a daily basis.
  4. Office 365 People: Office 365 also makes available a People API that we can use to retrieve and store the Top X connections based on a range of sources for each individual setup in the Directory. Here we can specify X in Polinode when we set the integration up for you but it's normally 20. We retrieve and store this data automatically once a week.
  5. Microsoft Teams: Our Teams integration can be setup to collect posts in public channels and/or posts in private channels as well as DM's and/or calls on both Teams and Skype for Business. Data is collected from the date it is setup and historical data is not retrieved.
  6. Slack: Our Slack integration can be setup to include only posts in public channels or it can optionally also include private DMs and private channels. If the latter is setup, individual user consent is required which Polinode will request and handle. Historical data can be imported.

ENTERPRISE USERS

There are quite a few options available when connecting to the various passive data sources available. Your account manager can talk you through them and help you to determine the best setup to achieve your objectives.

In the Data Sources section you will be able to see the staus of the connection, for example Ready to Connect, Soon to Run, Running, Active or In error. There is also a date provided that indicates when the last import of data was completed.

Queries

You will want to use the Queries section here to produce an interactive network from the stored metadata. To do so simply click the New Query button towards the top right of the screen and then:

  1. Give your query a name
  2. Select the sources that you want to run the query against, for example emails and meetings. You can include more than one source and for each source you can include a minimum number of interactions between two people for an edge in the network to be included as well as a maximum number of edges to include in the network from that source.
  3. Select a time period, this can be either a trailing time period (e.g. the last 180 days) or an exact time period where you specify a start date and an end date.
  4. Add any filters that you would like. These filters can be either a quick set of filters (which are email addresses and/or domains that you add just for this query) or you can select an existing list or lists to use as a blacklist or whitelist for this query only. If you do the latter then these emails or domains will be either included or excluded from the query. That is to say that it's a convenient way of limiting your query.

Once you've run your query you will see that the query is automatically saved so that you can re-run it again later if you would like. When you create a query the resulting network will be produced and will be available shortly after you run the query under the Networks tab.

Lists

The last tab is where you upload your lists, that is an Excel file that contains a set of domains and/or email addresses. It's these lists that you can then use as either Master Whitelists, Master Blacklists or to link to when setting up a query.

Settings

Towards the right of the screen you will find a button to access Settigns for the Passive Data integrations. Some of these settings are configured by Polinode on setup and some can be controlled by an Admin user in your organization. The configurable settings are detailed in the Master Lists and Data Export sections below whereas the non-configurable settings are covered in the Other Settings section.

Master Lists

These are settings that an admin user for your account can control and change.

  1. Master Whitelist: Under the Lists tab (see below) you can upload a series of lists that contain either email domains, addresses or both. Here you can specify one of these lists as a Master Whitelist, which means that when Polinode saves metadata for your organization it will only save the metadata if the associated email address matches either an email address or domain in the Master Whitelist. If no whitelist is specified then there will be no such restriction. This is typically used to limit the communication data that is saved to internal communication only. Note that if this list is edited it will apply going forward only and not historically.
  2. Master Blacklist: The Master Blacklist is similar to the Master Whitelist except that it operates to exclude (rather than include) specific domains or email addresses from the data collection.

Data Export

In this section you may optionally enter the name of an s3 bucket to export raw metadata collected by Polinode for further analysis. This includes timezone adjusted data such as the day of the week and hour of the day that individual interactions occurred at.

  1. Bucket Name: The name of the s3 bucket that you have given Polinode permission to write to. To grant Polinode permission to access this bucket you will want to click on the Bucket in the AWS client and navigate to permissions. Once at permissions click Add account under Access for other AWS accounts. Enter the following canonical ID for Polinode: bfcbf3387fd84983f1423b7f95aaddc6bfd3c6b09b5bcd4d5f4dde0ba4010d20. Grant Polinode both List Objects and Write Objects permissions.
  2. Path: The path in this bucket where Polinode should export your data.

Once you have configured the above click the Update Export Settings button to update these settings and then the Export Data button to start the data export to the specified bucket and path.

Other Settings

These are settings that can be set and changed via your Polinode Account Manager.

  1. Max Email Recipients: This is a setting controlled by your Account Manager and may be changed on request. It determines the maximum nunber of email recipients on an email after which the email is excluded for metadata analysis. The default is 100.
  2. Max Meeting Recipients: This setting is similar to Max Email Recipients but for Meeting Recipients. The default is 50.
  3. Number of People: This is also a settign controlled by your Account Manager and which can be changed on request. It relates to the Office 365 People API, i.e. it is the Top X people that are collected for each individual.
  4. Max Employees: This is the maximum number of employees for which metadata can be collected for. It is controlled by your Account Manager.
  5. Retention Period: Data is stored on a rolling basis, i.e. each day the last day of data is automatically dropped where the last day is determined by this retention period. This setting is controlled by your Account Manager.
  6. Initial Retrieval Period: This is the initial period that Polinode will go back when retrieving historical data when the integrations are first setup.

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