Cognillo Community Edition: What Usage Data is Shared?

Last updated: 2026-10-12

Find out what information the free Community Edition of Cognillo products sends to Cognillo, how it is stored, and how it is used.

Find out what information the free Community Edition of Cognillo products, such as SharePoint Essentials Toolkit and Genta, sends to Cognillo, how it is stored, and how it is used.

Usage information in Community Edition

Community Edition sends usage information to Cognillo. This can't be turned off in Community Edition.

In Professional and Enterprise editions, usage information is off by default.

Also see Cognillo Data Privacy Policy | PII Protection for SharePoint Tools

What is shared with Cognillo?

Usage information

A record is sent each time a job runs, and each time a license limit stops or narrows something you tried to do. Each record contains:

  • The type of job (for example, Permissions report or Copy lists), whether it finished, and how long it took.

  • Counts of the sites, lists, items and accounts processed, and how many had errors.

  • Which job options were used, recorded as on/off flags or counts (for example, "content filter used" or "3 find and replace rules").

  • Which license limit was reached, if any.

  • Your edition, product version, and a random install ID created when the product is installed.

Error information

  • If a job fails, the error details are included in the usage record so we can fix the cause.

  • Error messages come from SharePoint and Microsoft 365, and sometimes include the name of the list, file or site involved in the error.

What is not shared

Usage records do not include:

  • Tenant names

  • Usernames (except license email provided by customer)

  • SharePoint site, list or item URLs.

  • The content of any file, list item or page.

  • Information about applications other than SharePoint Essentials Toolkit or Genta.

How site collections are counted and stored

Applies to SharePoint Essentials Toolkit Community Edition, and Enterprise 100 (and legacy site limited) licenses that cover a fixed number of site collections.

Community Edition covers a fixed number of site collections. The Cognillo licensing service (licensing.cognillo.com) keeps that count, so it is the same on every computer you use and can't be lost or reset on one machine.

SharePoint URLs are never sent to Cognillo. Before anything leaves your computer:

  • Each site collection URL is converted to a one-way hash code using HMAC-SHA256, for example q3J8v...Xk=. The URL is first made lower case and any trailing slash is removed, so the same site always gives the same code.

  • Your Microsoft 365 tenant is identified the same way, by a hash code of its host name (for example, contoso.sharepoint.com).

A hash code can't be turned back into a URL. It can only be matched by hashing the same URL again, which is how the service recognizes a site it has already counted.

What is stored in the licensing database

The licensing service stores its records in Microsoft Azure data storage, in Cognillo's own Microsoft Azure subscription.

For each license, it stores:

  • The license key, and the email address the license was registered to.

  • The hash codes of the site collections counted against the license.

  • The hash code of the tenant those sites belong to.

  • The computer IDs and install IDs the license has been used from, and the product version.

    Computer ID: an identifier the licensing system generates from the computer's hardware when the product is activated. It does not contain the computer's name, user names, or IP address.
    Install ID: a random identifier created when the toolkit is first run. It identifies the installation only.

  • The site allowance, and when the record was created and last updated.

For each tenant, it stores:

  • The hash codes of the site collections counted across every Community license in that tenant. This is how the per-tenant limit is applied.

  • The license keys, computer IDs and install IDs seen in that tenant.

The tenant record itself is filed under a second hash of the tenant's hash code, so it carries no tenant name.

No SharePoint URLs, site names, tenant names, user names or content are stored.

How it is protected

  • licensing.cognillo.com, and only that service, using an Azure managed identity, can read or write the database.

  • Every answer the service sends back is digitally signed, so it can't be forged or changed on the way to your computer.

  • Professional and Enterprise licenses with unlimited sites don't contact this service at all.

If you need sites removed from your count, contact support@cognillo.com.

How your information is used

Cognillo uses this information internally to:

  • Apply the Community Edition site limits.

  • Make our tools more stable, by finding and fixing common errors.

  • Understand which features are used, so we can decide what to improve next.

Information collected from Community Edition is never sold or shared with third parties. It is stored in Cognillo's Microsoft Azure subscription.

For more about how we handle data, see our Privacy Policy.