Wednesday, November 27, 2024

SharePoint Advanced Management Updates

One of the more interesting announcements from this year’s Ignite conference is that SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) is now available to M365 Copilot customer without an additional cost.

Why is this so important?  As existing as it is to introduce Copilot to your users, there are preparation activities you need to take on.  The one thing that Copilot will do is that it will provide your data more easily and quickly than ever before.  As you will find out, there will be instances where data has already been overshared.  Copilot will correctly provide security trimmed data to your users, yet you will find instances where you will want to lock down that data.

To assist you with this, administrators can leverage SAM to implement stronger governance over your data.  Some of the key features of SAM are:

  • Managing Content Sprawl: It will help you identify and manage inactive SharePoint sites through automated rule-based policies.  This ensures that only relevant and active content is being leveraged by Copilot.  Before enabling Copilot, you can proactively set policies to restrict access to sites and manage content discoverability. 
  • Content Life-Cycle Management: SAM will streamline content creation, organization and retention through automated workflows, detailed reporting and compliance settings.  One specific feature is the site change history report.
  • Managing Oversharing: SAM will provide tools to control and prevent oversharing of confidential data ensuring that that sensitive information is not exposed inadvertently.  For instance, looking for sites with lots of links shared, sensitivity labels applied to files, and content shared with “everyone”.  Additionally, there are policies you can introduce to control data downloads.  Plus, you can add new policies that will restrict access control by only allowing users in a specified security group to access content.
  • AI Insights: This feature uses language models to identify patterns and potential issues from reporting, offering actional recommendations to solve content governance issues.  What AI Insights will do is provide you automated analysis of the reports, detect patterns and potential governance issues and then make suggestions for actions to take.

So how can you get started?

First, reduce accidental oversharing by reviewing sharing settings on sites.

Second, ensure that all sites have valid owners.  If sites are inactive and have no owners, it may be good to remove them.

Third, identify sites with potentially overshared content.  Run the reports and perform remediation actions.  Leverage restricted access control policies to override access to sites that are overly shared.  Additionally leverage Restricted Content Discoverability policies to control if specific sites should be returned in search results.

References:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/advanced-management 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-copilot-best-practices

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/get-ready-copilot-sharepoint-advanced-management