Microsoft SharePoint Premium Simplifies Content Management

This blog post was authored by Drew Madelung- Director, Microsoft MVP, Microsoft and Tom Wood - Senior Manager, Microsoft on Protiviti's technology insights blog.

Content management involves the creation, organisation, storage and distribution of digital content within an organisation, ranging from documents and images to videos and web pages. One of the biggest problems businesses face with content management is the quantity of unstructured content, which is growing exponentially, making it incredibly hard to find good or accurate data. Along with the size of data, a lack of cleanup reduces the findability or discoverability of content and increases the time it takes for employees to find relevant or accurate content.

Effective content management enhances efficiency, promotes collaboration, ensures consistency and helps businesses stay compliant with regulations while providing valuable insights for continuous improvement.

Topics

Risk Management and Regulatory Compliance Data, Analytics and Business Intelligence Technology Enablement

Microsoft SharePoint Premium

To support effective content management, we recommend clients consider Microsoft’s SharePoint Premium, a comprehensive suite of features and capabilities that can significantly enhance content management within an organisation. The solution combines the products formerly known as Microsoft Syntex and SharePoint Advanced Management to provide a unified tool for managing content, experiences, processing and governance while leveraging AI technologies. The goal of SharePoint Premium is to improve productivity, findability of content and add Microsoft-driven tools to govern the content lifecycle and content access.

SharePoint Premium allows AI to identify and extract information from unstructured and structured data for automation, data cleanup or data security. This core feature of SharePoint Premium is content processing, where AI-driven models are built for the extraction of information inside of the documents to be put into metadata in SharePoint. This solution can be used for tasks like invoice processing, where AI can automatically extract metadata from an invoice into separate data columns to improve findability, increase automation or have a different lifecycle for that piece of content. For example, a SharePoint Premium model can extract invoice fees and add an approval process based on invoices over a certain fee amount. AI is also used for automatic metadata classification, image processing and the autofill column functionality.

SharePoint Premium also provides SharePoint Advanced Management, a collection of tools to enhance control of SharePoint and OneDrive. It includes technologies to help with advanced access policies, secure document management and advanced site lifecycle policies.

SharePoint Premium is a powerful solution for organisations that want to take their content management to the next level and transform their content into knowledge and action.

Benefits and use cases

SharePoint Premium offers several advanced features and capabilities designed to empower organisations to effectively manage, secure and leverage content to drive business success. SharePoint Premium helps organisations by:

Automating legacy or complicated manual document processes to improve productivity; focusing on digital capture and content metadata extraction.
Decreasing the time it takes for employees to do certain activities including finding content, getting eSignatures and translating content.
Improving the full content lifecycle — from creation through content assembly, to automatic application of retention labels through models and overall site lifecycle — to perform an action on inactive sites.
Allowing employees to find what is relevant to them and administrators to ensure that risky content has appropriate access controls at the site and file level.

Some common use cases for organisations to use SharePoint Premium include:

Utilising prebuilt models for invoice, contract or receipt content processing to automatically extract information from these types of content in SharePoint Online to automate an approval process after file upload.
Sending contracts for eSignature, now directly within SharePoint Online.
Utilising data access governance reports to review existing file sharing links, with a goal to identify oversharing prior to enabling Copilot.
Blocking access to sites that contain sensitive data using restricted access control, prior to enabling Copilot.
Restricting OneDrive access for vendors within the organisation who have Entra ID accounts and are licensed for other M365 solutions.
Utilising optical character recognition (OCR) for image files in SharePoint Online to make them more findable through search.
Creating content using modern templates and content assembly based on metadata within a SharePoint site to fill in sections of the content.

SharePoint Premium can also provide value by providing AI automation against existing processes that are non-digital today and enhancing your overall capabilities for data governance making Copilot for Microsoft 365 more secure.

How to prepare for SharePoint Premium

To prepare for SharePoint Premium, organisations should:

Understand SharePoint Premium’s capabilities and what the prerequisites are for the solution to be set up including configuring pay-as-you-go. Note, a trial can be used for SharePoint Advanced Management solutions. Setup details for each of the solutions are available from Microsoft.
Identify use cases inside the organisation that fit SharePoint Premium focusing on content processing and automation. Meet with stakeholders to ask about pain points for findability and content management.
Identify a roadmap for which SharePoint Premium features should be used first based on priority identified through the stakeholders. It isn’t necessary to deploy everything at once.

Protiviti offers a SharePoint Premium Readiness Assessment and Roadmap to help organisations unlock the business potential, identify organisational readiness, and deliver a roadmap for translating SharePoint Premium scenarios into real value.

SharePoint Premium is a powerful solution for content management that leverages AI to improve productivity, findability of content, and governance of the content lifecycle. With its many features and use cases, it can provide value to organisations by automating processes, improving the content experience, and ensuring content governance.

To learn more about our Microsoft consulting services, contact us.

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