SharePoint Premium

What is SharePoint Premium

SharePoint Premium, a sophisticated platform for managing content and experiences, represents the next stage in the evolution of Microsoft Syntex by integrating AI, automation, and enhanced security into user’s content interactions, processing, and governance. SharePoint Premium introduces innovative methods to interact with essential content, overseeing and safeguarding it throughout its lifecycle. It also enables you to maximize the value of your content through security and organization, while getting it ready for Microsoft Copilot, the cutting-edge AI assistant that is revolutionizing productivity.

As of now, SharePoint Premium refers to the premium features available with SharePoint Online within Microsoft 365, typically with higher-tier plans. Here are the core features associated with SharePoint Premium:

Key Parts of SharePoint Premium:

1. Advanced Data Loss Prevention (DLP): Provides deeper control over sensitive information within SharePoint and OneDrive. Helps prevent unintentional sharing of confidential data.
2. Automation and Workflows: Integration with Power Automate for automating workflows (no-code solutions). Ability to build and deploy more complex workflows to streamline business processes.
3. Content Management & Records Management: Enhanced records management and compliance features. Retention Labels and Information Governance tools for regulatory compliance.
4. Enhanced Security: Advanced security capabilities such as Conditional Access, Multi-factor Authentication (MFA), and better identity management to keep content safe.
5. Advanced Search Capabilities: More powerful search features with Search Insights and more granular control to surface relevant content across the enterprise.
6. Business Intelligence (BI) Integration: Integration with Power BI for building dashboards and analysing SharePoint data. More sophisticated reporting and analysis options for data stored within SharePoint.
7. Personalized Branding & Customization: Ability to customize SharePoint sites with advanced branding options, personalized content, and more flexibility for site design.
8. Extended Site and User Management: Access to enhanced admin capabilities to manage large-scale environments. Enhanced user permissions management and more granular control over user access to content.
9. Microsoft Syntex Integration: Powered by AI, Syntex helps automate content processing, classifying documents, and extracting data automatically to save time on document management.
10. PowerApps and Power Automate Integration: SharePoint Premium integrates well with PowerApps for building custom business applications and Power Automate to streamline workflows and tasks.

Offered Features

SharePoint Premium offers a wide range of features and functionalities to further enhance your experience. These features are inherited from Microsoft Syntex. Integrated with SharePoint and the larger Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Microsoft Syntex is a cutting-edge content management and artificial intelligence (AI) tool. It improves the way businesses handle, comprehend, and process their content. The main attributes of SharePoint Premium and Microsoft Syntex are:

1. Document and Content Understanding:

This service provides the following main offerings:

• AI-Powered Content Classification: Syntex uses machine learning to automatically classify and organize documents. It can categorize documents based on their content and relevance to specific topics, like invoices, contracts, or policies, without manual tagging.
• Data Extraction: It can automatically extract key information from documents (e.g., dates, amounts, customer names). This is especially useful for processing forms or structured data (like contracts or invoices) quickly and accurately.
• Content Summarization: Syntex can provide summaries of documents, making it easier to find key information without having to read the entire document.

Setting up these features is done as part of the Pay-as-you-go services available for your organisation settings. The two most important functionalities offered are autofill columns and document processing.

Autofill columns:

Files uploaded to a SharePoint document library can have their content automatically extracted, summarized, or generated by Microsoft Syntex’s autofill columns. Large language models (LLMs) powered by generative AI enable autofill columns to automatically preserve metadata, simplifying the process of organizing files and the associated.

For instance, you can use natural language to ask a question (a prompt) of a document, and the system will save the answer straight to a library column. Alternatively, you can build up multiple of these questions to evaluate any file uploaded to a library, assigning a certain column to each response.

In the Microsoft 365 admin center you can configure the Microsoft Syntex autofill columns service.

• Requirements for Licencing: You must first link an Azure subscription in Syntex pay-as-you-go before you can use autofill columns. The kind and volume of transactions determine how much the autofill columns service costs.
• Required permissions: To access the Microsoft 365 admin center and configure autofill columns, you need to be a SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator.
• Configure autofill columns: Autofill columns are automatically set up and enabled for all SharePoint sites once an Azure subscription is connected to Microsoft Syntex. An admin can limit the usage of autofill column in the admin center settings.

This is how to use autofill columns as a SharePoint library manager:

A new option in the Create a column panel called Autofill enables you to produce or extract specified information from files in a SharePoint library using natural language prompts. Afterwards, the data shows up in the library’s columns. Multiple autofill columns can be created by users inside a single library.

To create a new autofill column:

• Choose +Add Column in a SharePoint library, choose the desired column type, and then click Next.

Enter a name for the column heading and a succinct explanation of the column data in the Create a column panel.

• Click on Set up in the Autofill area.
• Create the prompt in the Prompt box on the Autofill panel. The prompt asks what kind of data you wish to extract to a column from a file.
• An example prompt is first suggested automatically (for text and multi lines of text column types only). To view an alternative suggested prompt, click the Refresh button. To add the suggested prompt to the Prompt box, choose it. You can then make any necessary edits.

• Choose a file from the library to evaluate the prompt in the Test the prompt section. The Result box shows the results.
• Choose Save once you have the desired prompt. The library shows the new column.
• Choose which files you wish to use the autofill column for. Next, choose More options (…) > Autofill from the command bar.

• A notification appears telling you that autofill is beginning to process the files and that it may take a certain time to finish.
• Any new files uploaded to the library will be automatically processed and the extracted data is recorded to the appropriate columns once an autofill setting has been saved for a column.

Structured and freeform document processing:

Within SharePoint document libraries, Microsoft Syntex generates both structured and freeform document processing models using Microsoft Power Apps AI Builder document processing.

To identify and extract key-value pairs and table data from structured or semi-structured documents, like invoices and forms, as well as unstructured or freeform documents, like contracts and correspondence, you can utilize AI Builder document processing to create structured or freeform document processing models.

Large volumes of invoices are frequently sent to organizations via email, fax, and the mail. It can take a long time to process these papers and manually enter them into a database. Syntex automates this process by leveraging AI to extract the text, tables, and key-value pairs from your documents.

To identify every document supplied to the document library, for instance, you can develop a structured or freeform document processing model. You can then extract and view target data that is significant to you from each document.

You define the data to be extracted from your form and train your model using sample files. By training your model, it learns the structure of your document. To get started, all you need are five form documents. Syntex looks for key-value pairs in your example files, but you may also manually find any that might have gone undetected. You can use AI Builder to evaluate your model’s accuracy on your sample files.

Only in SharePoint document libraries where it is enabled can you design a structured or freeform document processing model. You can see the Classify and extract option in your document library if it has been activated.

2. Automated Content Tagging

This includes:

• Metadata Extraction: Syntex automatically adds metadata (such as keywords, document kinds, and themes) to documents. This guarantees that documents in SharePoint or other Microsoft 365 services are arranged and searchable with ease.
• Integration with the Microsoft 365 term store and taxonomy: It enables businesses to enforce uniform metadata tagging for improved classification.

Taxonomy tagging:

You can use Microsoft Syntex to automatically tag documents in SharePoint libraries with keywords that are set up in your term store using artificial intelligence. To make the documents easier to search, sort, filter, and manage, these terms are kept in a controlled metadata column (also called a taxonomy column) on the item.

For documents kept in document libraries, the taxonomy tagging feature provides an automated labelling solution. Users no longer need to manually tag documents or create and train complex AI models to tag simple terms thanks to this simple, no-training alternative. If you want to easily search for and identify documents in your library or set up any further procedures depending on the tags attached to files, this function is for you.

Taxonomy tagging is available for the following file types: .doc, .docx, .pdf, and .pptx.

Follow these steps to allow taxonomy tagging if your library already has a taxonomy column:

• Choose Column options > Edit from the Taxonomy column.
• Turn on the switch labelled “Automatically tag documents with terms” in the Edit column panel.

• Once enabled, the chosen term set is tagged in any newly uploaded papers or documents that have been changed within the library.

3. Forms Processing:

This includes:

• Capture and Extract Data from Forms: Syntex offers the ability to automatically read, extract, and transform data into structured formats from forms, including purchase orders, invoices, and receipts. This minimizes human error and does away with the necessity for manual data entry.
• Template-Based Processing: Syntex employs templates that users can construct for target document types (such as contracts or bills) to extract consistent data from massive volumes of documents.

4. Content Compliance and Governance:

This includes:

• Content Insights: Syntex may examine document content to offer information on legal and regulatory requirements. This can assist organizations in making sure their documents comply with relevant laws and regulations.
• Retention and Legal Hold: It works in tandem with the Microsoft Compliance Center to put legal holds and retention labels on documents, guaranteeing their preservation in accordance with business or legal requirements.

5. AI-Powered Search:

By employing AI to surface documents according to their content, metadata, and extracted information, Syntex enhances search within SharePoint. This eliminates the need to memorize certain keywords and facilitates the rapid discovery of pertinent materials.

6. eSignature:

SharePoint eSignature offers the security and compliance of Microsoft 365 while streamlining the signing and sharing of documents.

Sending documents for signatures to anyone inside and outside of your company is simple and safe using SharePoint eSignature. Additionally, you have a digital audit trail that you may use to confirm the legitimacy of transactions and documents.

SharePoint eSignature is currently available in the US, UK, Canada, the EU and Australia Pacific. It will be available worldwide in 2025. Furthermore, the use of other eSignature providers as an integration with the SharePoint eSignature platform is available globally.

SharePoint eSignature uses simple electronic signatures as defined under applicable law including, but not limited, to the Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 (the eIDAS Regulation).

DocuSign and Adobe Acrobat Sign are two more electronic signature services that have been linked with SharePoint eSignature. While guaranteeing the safe and automated storage of signed documents in Microsoft 365, you can use these additional providers to start requests from PDF documents in SharePoint. In the future, more electronic signature providers will be introduced.

The suppliers send out all pertinent notifications and streamline the signing process. A copy of the completed document is instantly saved in SharePoint for convenient access after signing is finished.

SharePoint eSignature is available for only PDF documents at this time. Tracking of SharePoint eSignature requests through the Approvals app in Microsoft Teams is now available.

Request an eSignature:

To begin the SharePoint eSignature process, follow these steps. You need to use your work email address to log into SharePoint.

Open the document you wish to begin the eSignature procedure on from a SharePoint document library.

Choose the pen icon in the document viewer.

You can designate up to ten internal or external signatories on the Create a signature request panel. Activate the Recipients must sign in order toggle if the recipients must sign sequentially. By dragging and dropping the receivers into the proper order, you can alter their order. Next, choose Next.

Drag and drop the Signature, Initials, and Date fields into the appropriate document locations for each recipient on the Create a signature request window (step 2 of 3). Each form field can be set as required or not.

Select Next, advance to the next stage. Each receiver must complete at least one required signature field. A total of 50 fields can be added to the document.

On the Create a signature request panel (step 3 of 3), enter a title for the request, an optional message, and double-check the details on the panel. Then, select Send.

Once sent, the request’s status is changed to In progress. An email notification is sent to both the creator and receivers. If Recipients must sign in order is enabled, recipients will be able to sign in the specified order; otherwise, they may sign in any order.

Licensing

The cost of Microsoft Syntex licenses varies depending on the licensing option and the amount of documents handled. It varies depending on your region and Microsoft’s pricing adjustments, so I recommend visiting the official Microsoft Syntex page or speaking with a Microsoft representative to obtain particular pricing information geared to your organization’s needs.

Pay-as-you-go services, such as unstructured and prebuilt document processing, are being made available to most Microsoft 365 commercial plans with no additional licensing. Administrators will need to provide billing information from Azure to activate services in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center and will be charged by usage starting at GA for each metered service.

Customers can activate these services by providing their Azure subscription billing information in the Microsoft Admin Center.

Licensing Availability:

• Microsoft Syntex can be added to the following plans:
  • Microsoft 365 E3 / E5
  • Office 365 E3 / E5
  • Microsoft 365 Business Premium or Business Standard (depending on the use case).

Key Microsoft Syntex Licensing Options

There are two primary ways to license Microsoft Syntex:

1. Microsoft Syntex Per User License
   • This option grants individual users access to the full suite of Microsoft Syntex capabilities for automating document understanding, content classification, metadata extraction, and more.
   • Syntex Per User allows users to apply AI-driven automation and classification directly within SharePoint Online and other Microsoft 365 apps.
2. Microsoft Syntex Per Document License
   • This option is based on the number of documents processed by Syntex.
   • It is a good choice for businesses that handle a large volume of documents but may not require the full feature set for all users.
   • Under this model, you are billed based on the number of documents processed, not the number of users.

For specific prices per service please visit the Microsoft official resource: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/syntex/syntex-pay-as-you-go-services

Conclusion

Microsoft Syntex is an excellent tool for businesses looking to leverage AI to automate document processing and streamline content management. The licensing is flexible and scalable, allowing businesses to choose between per-user or per-document models depending on their needs.