If you are an intranet owner or manager, you know how challenging it can be keeping your intranet content fresh, relevant, secure and engaging. You also know how important it is to leverage the latest technologies to enhance your intranet capabilities and user experience.
With that in mind, Microsoft has recently launched SharePoint Premium which expands on and improves the features of SharePoint Syntex, the AI-powered content service that was launched in 2020. It aims to provide more advanced and comprehensive features for managing, understanding and automating content across the entire SharePoint experience.
Read on to find out what SharePoint Premium is and how you can use it to manage your intranet more effectively.
What is SharePoint Premium?
SharePoint Premium, due to be available in the first half of 2024, is a set of advanced content services that help you manage, understand and automate your documents (not pages, which is possible with Fresh Intranet) in SharePoint and Microsoft 365. It includes the following features:
AI Builder: Lets you create and train custom AI models to extract information from your documents, such as invoices, contracts, forms, etc. You can use these models to automate workflows, generate insights and improve search and discovery.
E-signature: Allows you to send, sign and track documents electronically using Adobe Sign or DocuSign. You can streamline your approval processes, reduce paper usage and ensure compliance with legal standards.
Content assembly: Helps you create new documents from existing ones by using AI to suggest relevant content, images and metadata. You can save time, improve consistency and avoid duplication of work.
Content understanding: Uses AI to automatically tag your documents with metadata, such as topics, keywords, entities, etc. You can enhance your content classification, governance and findability.
Content network: Connects your SharePoint content with other sources, such as Power BI, Microsoft Graph, Azure Cognitive Services, etc. You can enrich your content with additional data, insights and functionality.
How can intranet owners use SharePoint Premium?
Whilst SharePoint Premium is in its infancy, and will ultimately have multiple uses, we believe the following five use cases will be most valuable for intranet owners.
1. Governance
The challenge with any sprawling intranet is there isn’t a single person who has a handle on all the areas and an overview of all of the content.
This can lead to the intranet having dark corners, places where the content is stale or where nobody’s accessed it for some time or worryingly, contains sensitive content that’s perhaps been unwittingly overshared.
With SharePoint Premium you’ll have access to various tools and features that will help you monitor and control the access, security and quality of your intranet content.
SharePoint Premium includes tools that enable you to access reviews, apply sensitivity labels, add auto-tagging and E-signatures to control who can access, share and modify content.
It gives you the ability to apply appropriate policies and permissions based on content type and its sensitivity. Plus, you can set alerts on the content usage and activity, as well as review access permissions to help prevent data leaks or over-sharing. You can also identify stale content by generating reports and insights on the content usage and activity.
For example, you can use AI Builder to detect sensitive or confidential information in your documents and apply the appropriate policies and permissions. Or you can use Content understanding to identify stale or outdated content and trigger a review or deletion actions. Or use E-signature to ensure the validity and traceability of your documents.
2. Document management and processing
We know that trying to stay on top of all the documents stored in your intranet can be a thankless task. You’ll be sitting on hundreds if not thousands of documents, policies and company procedures that are being added to all the time.
In those files you’ll also have invoices, receipts and documents that aren’t truly supposed to be in the intranet but have somehow been added into the bucket.
What you can do with SharePoint Premium is switch on auto-tagging, which will to organise and order your documents based on whether they’re a policy, statement of work, an employee contract or something else.
At this point you can have SharePoint Premium detect and flag which of the content is sensitive, so you can make sure the right permissions are automatically applied.
Say for example there’s a secret project to restructure the company underway or the beginnings of a merger and acquisition with another business. You can give the project code name like ‘Project Hexagon’, which will become a word or phrase that denotes something of sensitivity in your organisation.
You can configure SharePoint Premium so that whenever it detects the word ‘Hexagon’ or phrase ‘Project Hexagon’ in a document, it will automatically tag that in a way that protects it. For example, no one can forward it out of the organisation, print the document, copy it to their personal OneDrive or a USB drive, etc.
The magic of SharePoint Premium is you wouldn’t have to do anything to keep on top of it. You can just define the policy and tell SharePoint Premium what is sensitive, and it will take care of the rest for you.
3. AI image tagging
Intranets and digital workplaces tend to house a lot of content including images. Typically, intranets are used to store images such as brand assets, photos from your latest event or marketing content from a recent client webinar, as they may be useful to someone else one day.
Yet these images are near enough useless because no one can find them! Up until now, tagging and image description has had to be done manually, which can be a hit and miss process – meaning if they aren’t tagged or aren’t tagged correctly, often they can’t be found using your SharePoint search. So, you have to know where to look for them in order to find them.
However, with SharePoint Premium, once it’s switched on you can ask it to detect and tag each image within your tenant. It can cleverly find, read, then tag the images based on their content automatically, making them more findable, searchable and reusable.
4. Content translation
The biggest problem running a global intranet is content localisation. If you’re working for a multi-national company, with a presence in 10 to 20 countries, it’s likely you’ve got documents that are applicable to multiple regions.
Rather than translating these by hand, you can use SharePoint Premium’s auto translate capabilities to translate your chosen documents into the languages of choice.
We know what you’re thinking, however auto translation has come on leaps and bounds in recent years and it’s now way more accurate – with the potential to save you loads of time and cost compared to using manual translations.
If you’re not yet confident in its auto translation capabilities, why not try it on one or two documents and have them checked by a translator to see what you think.
5. Meeting transcriptions
Whether you’re working remotely or in the office, it’s likely you’ll be in multiple Teams calls during your day. Yet once off the recording what was said in the meeting is all but lost in the ether.
Yet, SharePoint Premium can generate transcriptions for all your video recordings as well as all your stored audio files, making them searchable and accessible.
It can even segment the video and audio content based on topics discussed within your meeting, making the content even easier to search/find.
Benefits of using SharePoint Premium in your intranet
As an intranet owner, there are a number of benefits of using SharePoint Premium depending on your goals, needs and challenges.
Improve content quality and consistency
You can ensure your content is more accurate, relevant and up to date, by using AI to tag, categorize and review content as well as apply appropriate policies and permissions. This can improve the quality and consistency of your intranet’s content, whilst making it easier for colleagues to find, access and reuse.
Enhance content discovery and engagement
Your content can be more discoverable and engaging by using AI to generate summaries, key points and translations from content. Using SharePoint Premium to tag your content and ensure good access management can help improve your content’s discoverability and reach, providing a better user experience for your colleagues.
Reduce content costs and risks
Reduce the costs and risks associated with content management and collaboration, by using AI to automate content workflows and processes, and to identify and mitigate content risks. This can help save time and resources, whilst improving the content’s compliance and security.
Prepare for Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption
SharePoint Premium helps keep your documents organized, accessible and secure within Microsoft 365, contributing to a smoother rollout and better adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot.
How to get started with SharePoint Premium with Advania UK
If you are interested in trying out SharePoint Premium, contact our parent company Advania UK for help. SharePoint Premium offers flexible licensing options through either seat licenses or pay-as-you-go services; the Advania UK team can help you sort out the best licensing strategy.
The Advania UK team will work with your CTO to select sites for SharePoint Premium deployment and will ensure the right people have the necessary permissions to use its features.
They’ll also set up alerts and reports to monitor your SharePoint Premium usage and costs, which is ideal for the pay-as-you-go licensing option. In this model, where billing is based on usage, alerts can inform you when you’re reaching your maximum spend.
Working with their team of experts, you can create and train AI models using AI Builder, send and sign documents using E-signature, generate and assemble content using Content assembly, tag and classify content using Content understanding, and connect and enrich content using Content network.
Content management in Fresh
If you’re an existing Fresh customer, you can extend your investment in SharePoint Premium by taking advantage of the content management options within Fresh Intranet.
Fresh allows you to go beyond only document management as it also supports content management for pages (content pages and news posts) in SharePoint.
The following three components are a glimpse of the content governance options available in Fresh.
Bulk updates for descriptions and metadata:
Coming soon to Fresh, you’ll be able to update the metadata and descriptions of up to 30 documents and pages in a single action, simplifying content tagging within your intranet.
Governance:
Fresh’s content report web part makes governance easy. It gives you an overview of all the documents and pages within your intranet, including their related metadata. The web part also allows you to download the data it surfaces in CSV format so you can have deeper analysis of your content in Excel or Power BI.
Configuring review dates and content owners for intranet content:
With Fresh, you can define review dates and owners for specific content. You can extend this metadata with a workflow-based solution, such as Power Automate, to notify content owners about content that is up for review, building a process that helps keep your intranet pages and documents up to date.
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Want to discover the benefits of SharePoint Premium in your intranet? Get in touch with Fresh to find out more.