FAQs Connectors

How are Starmind connectors different from Starmind Integrations?
Starmind connectors crawl data related to the user's knowledge from other applications and enhance their profiles on Starmind. In other words, connectors bring user know-how from other tools to Starmind, whereas Starmind integrations help to bring the network knowledge and user know-how from Starmind into other tools.

What’s the benefit of a connector?
While many Starmind clients have had successful rollouts without connecting any of their data sources to Starmind, doing so offers many benefits:

Starmind can be the primary source to access all expert knowledge in an organization without requiring everyone to use the platform, thus actively reducing “app overload".

Starmind won’t just be a tool for specific topics or departments, but can develop a more holistic understanding of who knows what.

Starmind will be smarter from day one at launch and when expanding to new departments.

As more clients connect their data sources, we will develop metrics to demonstrate those benefits where possible.

Can I implement a connector that is not part of Starmind’s Out-of-box options? Will Starmind build a new connector for me?
Reach out to your solution architect to discuss the requirements and the possible next steps.

What makes a good data source for Starmind to learn from?
The four important requirements for data to be useful are:

Each entry or item contains the consistent and relevant text we can extract topics from or the topics directly.
Each entry or item has at least one person associated with it who can be unambiguously identified (for example, by email address).
Each entry or item has a date and time when it happened.
The data source contains data that can be associated with many users.

Examples of data sources that are not good sources for Starmind:

Videos or images, as we cannot extract topics from them.
Company press material, as it may be difficult to correctly associate the content with specific people.
A specific user's files, as they will bias the network to just that user.

Who will support me if I want to use Starmind’s Connectors? What are the client-side requirements for connectors?
Solution Architects are responsible for setting up the connectors for you. Please reach out to your dedicated Solution Architect or Account Manager. They will also consult you regarding the requirements or you can read our connectors documentation here.

Privacy

How does Starmind ensure data privacy? What data is shared with Starmind if I decide to implement one of the connectors?
Starmind only targets publicly available data and the relevant information in it, filtering out non-relevant information. We only read from the data where we could learn about a users knowledge and know-how. From the technical side, we only call the API endpoints which we need and get data only from those endpoints.

For example: In the O365 Calendar connector, we only learn from the events that have sensitivity metrics ‘normal’ and are public events where there are at least 2 participants. We don't learn from private events.

Starmind does not store the whole text document. It only extracts data as a tag or a topic which has an association with a user's knowledge. Starmind only stores these extracted tags in the user profile.

What happens to my data once the connection process is completed?
As soon as the connector has run to its completion state, Starmind forgets and dumps the processed data.

How does Starmind ensure the privacy of a User?
Starmind extracts and transfers the data for the users who have accepted our general terms and conditions. For the deactivated users and the users who have not signed in to Starmind yet, we do extract the expertise from other tools, but we keep it anonymised until user has logged in and accepted our terms and conditions.