SharePoint Advanced Management is an add-on to Microsoft 365. Microsoft says that it is a powerful suite of tools for IT admins to bolster content governance throughout the Microsoft Copilot deployment journey. Let us have a closer look at what SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) is how exactly it helps with governance enforcement in the Copilot era.

Microsoft classifies SAM’s features as “Manage content sprawl”, “Manage content lifecycle”, “Manage permissions and access”. I’d put SAM’s tools into these buckets: Reports, Policies, Search, Features.

SAM Reports

Reports are something that provides you with data, so you can analyze these date and use them to build/update your own governance strategy and maybe take some immediate action. Reports available are:

• Change history reports
  you can choose org-wide or site-level settings, specify date range, sites and all or specific admins
• Enterprise App Insights
• OneDrive Accounts report
• Data Access Governance (3 different ones)
  • Sharing Links with 3 pre-configured reports:
    Anyone links, People in your org links and Specific People links shared externally
  • Sensitivity labels applied to files: select label -> generate report
  • Content Shared with Everyone Except External Users:
    to discover specific sites whose content was made accessible for EEEU
    you can scope down the report by site template and privacy
    and choose from two types of report: where specific files/folders/lists are shared with EEEU or “Site membership” where EEEU was added as a member

SAM Policies

Policies allows you to set some governance rules, so that rules will be applied automatically, with no or little your intervention. SharePoint Advanced Management policies are:

• Site Lifecycle management: Inactive Site Policy. Allows:
  • identify inactive sites
  • send notifications to site owners and/or admins
  • automatically archive or make sites read-only (or do nothing – just report)
• Site Lifecycle management: Site Ownership Policy
  (not available at this moment)

AI Insights – report feature that uses a language model to identify patterns and potential issues and provide actionable recommendations to solve issues

Features

Features are smaller that policies, more like an update to existing functionality.

• Conditional access to SharePoint site policy
  This enhances existing conditional access Entra Id feature with the ability to apply the policy to SharePoint sites directly or via Site sensitivity label.
• OneDrive access restriction
• SharePoint site-level access restrictions
• Block download policy
• Your recent actions
• Default sensitivity labels for document libraries
• Site access review

SAM for Search

I put it separately:

• restrict discovery of SharePoint sites and content
• Restricted SharePoint search

TBP