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Introducing SharePoint Premium – the future of AI powered content management and experiences

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In current world, content plays a major role in any of the organization. SharePoint is the key player from Microsoft Team when it comes to content.

As part of Ignite 2023, Microsoft has announced SharePoint Premium, an advanced content management and experiences platform and the next evolution for Syntex.

Evolution of Syntex ?

Microsoft claims SharePoint Premium as the next evolution of Syntex, as the services offered by Syntex currently are ported to SharePoint Premium.

Microsoft Graph APIs

Microsoft also announces the availability of Microsoft Graph APIs for SharePoint Premium. It enables integration of document processing, content assembly and related services to our own custom apps.

SharePoint Premium mainly focuses on the below key areas

Let’s walk over each of them on what do they offer.

I. Content Experiences

SharePoint Premium offers rich solutions to enhance the experience on any file and brings in solutions specific for your critical high value documents. Let’s walk over each of them in detail.

  1. Integrated file viewer : Power of Office collaboration now comes to the integrated file viewer. Just as you do for Office documents today, soon you’ll be able to add ink, comments, mentions, tasks and more to any supported file type(over 400 file types supported).

    Annotations in a PDF file

  2. Business Documents app in Teams : SharePoint Premium offers new solutions to enhance the experience in handling high value documents such as contracts, statements of work, orders, invoices. New Business Documents app in Teams is the one that comes for help. You can have the complete list of high-value documents in a single unified view in this app. You’ll get actionable insights like timely alerts for contracts that are expiring soon or need attention.
    The key features of the app include
       ✓   Create new contracts in Word app
       ✓   Supports standard templates that leverage content assembly to fill in key details for new contracts
       ✓   Compare a contract with related contracts using the new AI-driven rules deviation engine
       ✓   E-Verify your contracts once approved by routing for signature using SharePoint eSignature
       ✓   Engage outside parties to sign and approve the document, meanwhile your confidential data stays within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary
    Business Documents App - Home Page
    If offers insights on the documents - status & customer-wise.

    Business Documents App - Agreements Page
    All your high value documents such as contracts, statements of work, orders, invoices are listed here along with their current status.

II. Content Processing

  1. SharePoint eSignature : It securely digitizes your document approval workflows. It will be generally available and rolling out through the first quarter of 2024, beginning with tenants in the United States.
  2. Microsoft also announces Adobe and DocuSign as their SharePoint eSignature launch partners. Third-party integration with Adobe Acrobat Sign and DocuSign will be generally available in early 2024.
  3. As mentioned earlier in this document, services such as document processing, content assembly, optical character recognition, image processing and taxonomy tagging have all reached general availability under the Syntex brand, and going forward will be part of SharePoint Premium.
  4. pay-as-you-go services Microsoft also announces the following new pay-as-you-go services for SharePoint Premium which are expected to be generally available by the end of December 2023:
    • Translation for files and Stream video – Automatically translates files and Stream video transcripts among dozens of supported languages, and at scale.
    • The new AI powered video cleanup automatically removes pauses and fillers in recordings.
      Many more are expected to add-up in the first half of 2024 that include :
    • Autofill columns - dynamically adds a new column to a document library and automatically fills in discovered values with the power of AI.
    • PII detection – identify files containing personally identifiable information (PII) such as addresses, phone numbers, credit card details and more.
    • Multilabel classifier – Using a single AI model to automatically set content type and determine the right model to apply for full data extract and analysis, rather than running multiple models to find the best match.
    • Redaction – Find and remove visibility of selective sensitive information – such as names, addresses, social security numbers from the content.

III. Content Governance

The more crucial part of Content Governance is to ensure

   ✓   Right amount if information is shared
   ✓   With respect to sensitive information
         Θ      Avoid oversharing
         Θ      Avoid exposure in search
         Θ      Avoid exposure in Copilot
   ✓   Manage content at scale throughout its lifecycle

1. Site access reviews

Data Access Governance (DAG) insights offer help by providing a top-level view of potentially overshared sites - filtered by sharing policy, Teams-connected sites, sensitivity labels, privacy, and more.

A sample DAG Report

SharePoint Premium adds more value to this, by enabling IT to trigger site access reviews with content owners for potentially at-risk content, asking them to review access, making needed changes and confirming that sites are being properly shared.

2. Restricted Access Control

You can enable the new Restricted Access Control policy by specifying the security groups that should be allowed access, regardless if files were shared directly for overshared sites.

3. AI-driven policy recommendations

AI can transform not only productivity, but also governance and administration. AI-driven policy recommendations can compare a sample set of sites with well-governed access policies to other sites across the tenant, semantically matched, and then recommend optimal access policies.

4. Content Event Insights

On the other hand, Content Event Insights allow you to find “interesting” moments in the content lifecycle, such as high-volume sharing or large download volumes. Content Event Insights also provide important context, such as impacted users and specific files involved.

5. Copilot in the SharePoint admin center

Microsoft also focuses on accelerating admin productivity with AI. You’ll soon be able to use Copilot in the SharePoint admin center to find sites with issues like oversharing, missing classifications, or inactivity – and use Copilot to help build the right policies to manage access, classification, and archiving.

IV. Microsoft 365 Archive

Microsoft 365 Archive lets you manage storage costs while keeping information architecture update. You can extend SharePoint Premium policies to move older sites with out-of-date content to Microsoft 365 archive storage.

Archive preserves the full richness of OneDrive and SharePoint content with versions, metadata, and security. It transfers the file at rest to multiply redundant storage inside the Microsoft 365 trust boundary.

Archived content is removed from direct end user access and search, but all archived content keeps its security and retention policy. Admins can still search for it and execute compliance actions, such as eDiscovery or record disposal.

Microsoft 365 Archive is available in public preview.
We can pay only for storage usage over and above your allocated Microsoft 365 storage.

V. Microsoft 365 Backup

Protecting vital data from disasters like ransomware attacks requires backup. Microsoft 365 Backup, and compliant solutions from partners who can provide you with unprecedented backup and recovery speed, scale, and reliability.

Microsoft 365 Backup will roll out to paid public preview later in 2023.
We can pay only for storage usage over and above your allocated Microsoft 365 storage.

SharePoint Premium Licensing Models

Services available now under the Syntex brand will be moving to the SharePoint Premium brand in 2024. SharePoint Premium will include two licensing models:

References :

  1. About SharePoint Premium : https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/sharepoint-premium-blog/introducing-sharepoint-premium-the-future-of-ai-powered-content
  2. Learning more about deploying and using SharePoint Premium on the Microsoft Adoption Hub : https://aka.ms/SharePointPremium/Adoption
  3. Overview of Microsoft 365 Archive : https://aka.ms/archivepreviewdocs
#Office365 #Sharepoint #Microsoft Sharepoint #SharePoint Online