Tag Archives: SharePoint Advanced Management

SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM, aka SharePoint Premium) is a set of tools and features for IT admins to bolster content governance in the Microsoft 365.

SAM – Data Access Governance – Content Shared with EEEU

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This article is for SharePoint or Microsoft 365 admins focusing on governance and information protection. If you have SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) – aka SharePoint Premium licensed or you got at least one Copilot for Microsoft 365 license (as having m365 Copilot license automatically enables SharePoint Advanced Management in tenant), then under reports – Data access governance (in SharePoint admin center) – you can not only get Content shared with ‘Everyone except external users’ (EEEU) reports, but also initiate access review. Let us look more closely at this functionality and discuss the pros and cons..

I’ll not repeat Microsoft documents:
– SharePoint Advanced Management
– Content shared with ‘Everyone except external users’ (EEEU) reports
– Site access reviews for Data access governance reports
but I’ll focus on what is not there and a real-world experience.

GUI only

Once you got report – you can initiate access review. All must be done in GUI, click-click-click selecting sites… But what if you have thousands? There is no PowerShell cmdlets or API for this functionality, which really limits your ability to implement it gracefully, especially in large Microsoft 365 environments and automate it.

Download detailed report

Report “Specific files/folders/lists…” does not include files, folders, list – i.e. it does not include what exactly is shared with EEEU. Report includes site id, url, name, template, is it teams-connected, sensitivity (?), privacy, external sharing, primary admin name and email, and number of items (?) shared with EEEU.

So technically you can communicate to site owners, but you’d need to rely on them to figure out what content is shared with everyone.

Email template

When you initiate Site access review – an e-mail notification is send to site owners. This e-mail is not customizable at all. The only admin can do is to add a message (for every “initiate Site access review” action).

This email comes from “SharePoint Online <no-reply@sharepointonline>” address (not customizable), so comes “from outside of your organization” and can be considered as scam.

Microsoft’s logos and other graphics are blocked by default and e-mail includes a button “View shared items” – enough red flags for users to consider it as spam. Keep this in mind.

The good news is e-mail contains site name – so site owner can recognize it at act accordingly.

SharePoint Advanced Management

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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