Introducing SharePoint Premium – the future of AI powered content management and experiences
Content is the lifeblood of every organization. It is how great teams collaborate to build better products and services to delight customers. It is how leaders drive process transformation to increase agility and lower costs. And how organizations harness their knowledge to make better decisions and help employees grow. Because of this, more content is being created than ever before – two billion documents daily in Microsoft 365 – so it needs to be organized and managed with robust processes, security and compliance. As the opportunities with AI and Copilot make content even more valuable to the growth of your organization and your employees, this means a comprehensive and innovative content management solution is more valuable than ever.
SharePoint is the world’s largest and most flexible cloud content management platform. It powers all of Microsoft 365 – OneDrive, Teams, Syntex, Viva, Loop, Stream and now Microsoft 365 Copilot. SharePoint content is also a primary source for your experiences in Copilot. But it’s more than that.
Introducing SharePoint Premium
Today we’re excited to introduce the new SharePoint Premium, our advanced content management and experiences platform and our next evolution for Syntex. SharePoint Premium brings AI, automation, and added security to your content experiences, processing, and governance. With SharePoint Premium we’ll be transitioning the services already released as part of Syntex, including SharePoint Advanced Management, to join the growing family of SharePoint services along with brand new content experiences.
SharePoint Premium delivers new ways to engage with your most critical content, managing and protecting it through its lifecycle. It also helps you maximize content value with security and structure – and prepare it for Copilot for Microsoft 365, the next-generation AI assistant that is transforming productivity.
• Content experiences and solutions – boost employee productivity, improve your business processes by keeping content fresh, enable discovery, and collaborate on hundreds of file types. Optimize critical business document processes like contracts, invoices, SOWs, and more with AI, security, and workflow.
• Content processing – organize your content to maximize its value with AI-driven automation to build, classify & tag documents and prepare content for Copilot.
• Content governance – actively address oversharing and content sprawl by managing the content lifecycle and control access with simple yet powerful tools.
SharePoint today
And it’s all driven by SharePoint. SharePoint empowers you to collaborate, inform, and deliver with dynamic sites, personalized news, and secure file sharing.
o Collaborate: Empower teams with dynamic sites in Microsoft Teams. Sync and share files, data, and resources securely.
o Inform: Publish info & resources on your intranet. Tell your story with beautiful custom sites and personalized, targeted news.
o Deliver: Access, manage and store collaborative and transactional content in our flexible high scale cloud platform integrated across Microsoft 365
SharePoint is content management. Hosting managed content in SharePoint enables you to build rich applications that go beyond Microsoft 365 with fully managed and controlled content inside your organization trust boundary – from no code to fully managed solutions. Today, you can extend and develop apps and solutions for SharePoint pages, portals and SharePoint content using a broad range of developer capabilities, including Power Platform, Microsoft Graph APIs, Microsoft Graph Data Connect for SharePoint, SharePoint Framework (“SPFx”) and more.
As we announced in May 2023 at the M365 Conference, we’re redefining intranet content by empowering everyone to create new types of SharePoint sites and pages content more easily.
o Simpler authoring – we introduced Copilot in SharePoint, a new SharePoint home page, and page coauthoring. You’ll be able to use natural language and AI to create SharePoint pages faster and easier and collaborate with others in real time.
o Compelling content – SharePoint is getting a major aesthetic update. You’ll be able to create visually stunning sites and pages that embrace images and videos in new ways to express your brand.
o Deeper engagement – with new integrations for SharePoint into email, Teams, and Microsoft Viva you’ll meet your readers where they work and measure the impact.
o Flexible platform – our investment in top-notch user experience and developer extensibility means your custom solutions will continue to work through future updates
Last year we introduced Microsoft Syntex, our solutions to help you enhance, manage, and extend your content with AI powered workflows for everyone in the organization.
And last month we introduced you to our next generation of content experiences in OneDrive, with innovations to help you find, create, and share your content beautifully from any location on any device. We’re making file sharing simpler than ever with a consistent interface across Microsoft for all your file destinations and types with a great experience, secure sharing, and innovative experiences for people, meetings, media and Copilot.
Let’s look forward and explore SharePoint Premium.
Content platforms need to do more than store files. They need to offer rich solutions that are ready to run on any file, throughout the lifecycle of your critical high value documents.
First, we’re extending the power of Office collaboration to our integrated file viewer. With support for over 400 file types, soon you’ll be able to add ink, comments, mentions, tasks and more to any supported file type, just as you do for Office documents today.
SharePoint Premium introduces new solutions to work with high value documents. You can work with contracts, statements of work, orders, invoices and more in the new Business Documents app in Teams. In the app, you can review the full list of high-value documents in a unified view. You’ll get actionable insights like timely alerts for contracts that are expiring soon or need attention.
And you can build new contracts inside Word, using standard templates that leverage content assembly to fill in key details for new contracts. You can also compare a contract with related contracts using the new AI-driven rules deviation engine, to spotlight changes that may require additional attention or raise risks. Once approved, contracts can be routed for signature using SharePoint eSignature. Information stays within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary, so it doesn’t leave your tenant – and you can engage outside parties to sign and approve the document.
You can upload large volumes of high-value documents and the new AI-driven clause analyzer will automatically analyze and distill high risk contracts that require your attention along with risks identified.
You can also extend your content to external suppliers, vendors, and customers with our new Document Portal. The Document Portal lets you set up an easily accessible external site, branded to match your organization’s look and feel, integrated with consumer or organizational identities so you can collaborate on selected documents with confidence.
Content Processing
As part of Microsoft Syntex, we’ve given you new ways to use AI to classify, tag, secure the documents you have and ensure that new documents are built with automated templates to create content at scale. Enriching content with security and structure is one of the best ways to optimize workflows and ground content for new AI experiences like Copilot.
SharePoint eSignature 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. And if your organization currently uses other eSignature services, we’re also excited to announce Adobe and DocuSign as our SharePoint eSignature launch partners. Third-party integration with Adobe Acrobat Sign and DocuSign will be generally available in early 2024.
Today, 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.
We’re also pleased to announce the following new pay-as-you-go services for SharePoint Premium will be generally available by the end of December 2023:
• Translation for files and Stream video – convert files and Stream video transcripts among dozens of supported languages, automatically and at scale. Today we’re also announcing translation services for Stream video in SharePoint and new AI powered video cleanup that automatically removes pauses and fillers in recordings.
There will be even more coming in the first half of 2024:
• Autofill columns -allow you to dynamically add a new column to a document library and use AI to automatically fill in discovered values
• PII detection – flag files containing personally identifiable information (PII) such as addresses, phone numbers, credit card details and more.
• Multilabel classifier – run 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 for select sensitive information, such as names, addresses, social security numbers, from content viewing.
Availability
You can start using SharePoint Premium today:
• Content processing services like document processing, content assembly, OCR, eSignature and more are already generally available under the Syntex brand on a pay-as-you-go basis to most Microsoft 365 plans.
• You can also purchase our content governance today under the SharePoint Advanced Management (“SAM”) brand.
Services available now under the Syntex brand will be moving to the SharePoint Premium brand in 2024. SharePoint Premium will include two licensing models:
• Content processing services, such as document processing, eSignature, PII detection, autofill columns, content assembly, translation and image processing will be available on a pay-as-you-go basis to most Microsoft 365 plans.
• New capabilities such as Business Documents app, Documents Hub, and the enhanced file viewer, as well as “SAM” will be available as seat licensed services you can add to Microsoft 365 plans, with pricing to be announced at GA in 2024.
Microsoft 365 Archive is available today in paid public preview, and Microsoft 365 Backup will also be available in paid public preview by the end of 2023.
We’ve previously shared updates on repository services – a headless version of SharePoint that allows developers to use backend capabilities such as version, sharing, search, coauthoring retention and sensitivity to content in custom apps. We’ll have more updates on next steps for using repository services with SharePoint content before the end of 2023.