Governing data for GenAI with SharePoint Advanced Management

like What’s new in Microsoft 365 Copilot To enable customers to accelerate content creation faster than ever before, extending existing IT controls for content and access governance is more necessary than ever.

SharePoint advanced management features are a set of capabilities designed to simplify data governance and data cleansing across Microsoft 365, and improve both your security posture and Copilot experience.

Today, we’re excited to announce several new capabilities that will help customers prepare for generative AI, including securing sensitive data, identifying overshared content, enabling AI-driven access controls, and easily removing irrelevant content.

Data authorization and access tracking are core principles of data governance that ensure data is accessible only to those who need access and audit access for evidence and control. New Permit Status ReportCurrently in public preview, it provides admins with a bird’s eye view of all site permissions across SharePoint, OneDrive, and Files, helping them discover potentially over-privileged content across their tenant. This allows admins to address those sites so that results returned in Copilot or Search are limited to only those users who have access to that information.

Screenshot: Permission Status Report

Organizations can make better informed decisions when their data is secure, complete, and consistent. AI-based semantic matching of sitesAlso in public preview, a powerful and intelligent feature that allows administrators to search for unstructured content and semantically detect patterns that match predefined samples. Administrators can provide a list of sites with “similar” documents, such as sales or legal, and the service will find all sites that semantically match the input, and then provide policy recommendations for the matching sites, helping to achieve good governance more quickly.

Screenshot: AI-based semantic matching of sites

Site Ownership Policy (Launched in October) Enables administrators to automate time-consuming tasks associated with managing content ownership, such as maintaining a minimum number of site owners and identifying the most appropriate and accountable individuals, using a rules-based policy engine. Effective content ownership and accountability is essential for actions such as access review and content certification, which help prevent unintended access by Copilot and curate content to reduce instances of oversharing.

Screenshot: Site Ownership Policy

Enabling responsible groups or individuals within an organization to access, describe, protect, and control data quality is fundamental to governance. Search limited content (Launched in November) Administrators can configure policies to restrict Search and Copilot from inferring selected data sites, which does not change site access but prevents site content from surfacing in Copilot or organization-wide searches. These policies can be granularly controlled for team sites, communication sites, or any other site type.

Identifying reliable sources and ensuring that data comes from agreed-upon factual sources ensures accuracy and consistency in searches and Copilot responses. Create a restricted site (Released in October) Admins can now restrict SharePoint site creation to specific groups of users, helping to mitigate content proliferation within their organizations.

Screenshot: User experience when restricted content search is enabled

Inactive SharePoint Site Policy (Launched in October) Helps reduce large governance footprints with supported actions like archiving, setting content to read-only, or attesting. These actions help customers narrow the scope of what governance is needed, minimize oversharing, and remove old or irrelevant content, ultimately improving the quality of Copilot responses.

One of the most widely used mechanisms for sharing content internally and across an organization is to use the ‘Everyone except external users’ group. Data Access Governance Report for content shared with ‘Everyone except external users’ in the last 28 days (Now Available) Helps tenant administrators identify recently created “public” sites and content shared with these groups. This report also includes integrated actions so administrators can initiate access reviews and secure content during the assessment process, including Copilot.

Screenshot: Data Access Governance Report for content shared with ‘Everyone except external users’

As customers add billions of new documents to Microsoft 365 every day and look for solutions that can manage content at scale throughout its lifecycle, these SharePoint advanced management capabilities are more valuable than ever.

Click here to learn how to use these and other features. Prepare for Copilot for Microsoft 365 using SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) – SharePoint in Mi….