SharePoint is probably a familiar product to you, but now, you have probably been hearing some whispers about SharePoint Premium! It wouldn't be surprising if this made you scratch your head and wonder what features are offered in SharePoint Premium, and what you aren't getting with regular SharePoint. The bad news about this is that SharePoint Premium is still fairly new, and it's hard to find a consistent set of information on exactly what SharePoint Premium offers. Fear not, we're here to help!
Firstly, it's important to note that the core features of SharePoint such as document storage, collaboration, sites, lists, and libraries are not impacted by SharePoint Premium. These core features are the same as ever, and you get all of the SharePoint-y goodness that you are used to without any additional cost.
Instead of changing the core product, SharePoint Premium is a suite of products that offer additional AI-enabled tools to make your SharePoint experience better and to help automate your processes at the same time. The SharePoint Premium umbrella covers a bunch of capabilities:
Document Processing comprises a set of modules that allow you to train AI models to identify, classify, and extract data from documents. There are pre made models for contracts, receipts, and invoices, and the opportunity to train models on your own documents for specific use cases.
Content Assembly is a set of tools that allows you to take metadata and insert it automatically into template documents to create personalized forms, letters, or other types of documents. These features are great if you have template driven processes that are currently dependent on manually filling out documents.
Translation enables you to use AI powered engines to automatically translate content (documents, videos) to many different languages.
Content Summarization gives your people the power to generate AI summaries of documents to distill key points and save time from reading.
Image tagging and OCR improves the ability to extract information from images and or documents that may not initially be able to highlight text.
eSignature gives you a new ability to send documents for signature straight from SharePoint without any third party tools.
Improved Microsoft Search adds capabilities to the search bar and gives you more ability to find content quicker and easier using additional filtering, Natural Language Processing, and improved context via AI models.
Annotation and Redaction allows you to mark up and modify documents in the SharePoint viewer.
Content Rules Engine gives you the capability to build workflows based on the context of documents, metadata, or users.
Auto fill columns allows you to add new metadata fields to libraries and have them automatically filled by the AI extraction and understanding engine.
Microsoft 365 backup and archive gives you improved backup and archival capabilities for your content. Back up will drastically improve your disaster recovery capabilities in SharePoint, and archive to help you reduce storage cost by keeping older, disused documents in 'Cold Storage'.
SharePoint Advanced Management offers you additional reports and improved security capabilities to add additional layers of restrictions and context-dependent access to your documents.
Premium is still a very new product family, some of the broad features above may not be available in your tenant or in your location yet as Microsoft continues to roll them out across the world. This list is comprised of currently released (or announced) features as of April 2024 that will be available in the SharePoint Premium product family. But, as is normal with new product families, the features may change over time.
The other important thing to note is that SharePoint Premium is separate from Copilot. While Copilot is able to add useful AI features to people's day-to-day, the application of AI in SharePoint Premium is very different from Copilot. However, in a lot of cases they end up being quite complementary.
It is also important to note that most SharePoint Premium features are available on a pay as you go basis, where you can select the features you want to implement and pay the usage cost for just those features. This gives you a more bite sized way to begin using some of these capabilities in smaller volumes to start realizing the benefits. It's also extremely easy to slowly scale as you begin to find new use cases for these tools.
We at Cadence Solutions have been working extensively with SharePoint Premium since it was released, and we have many insights that we can offer if you are curious about use cases or the performance of any of these tools. Or, if you're interested in how AI can impact your business we may have some insights that can help you figure out how to bring AI safely into your business with governance in mind.
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