Content Governance in SharePoint Premium Overview

By Microsoft MVP and MCT · Pluralsight Author

Published March 25, 2025 · Learning & Credentials, Microsoft 365, SharePoint

Content Governance in SharePoint Premium is more than just SAM! It’s all the features allowing you to keep your data secure, backed up, and most importantly, Copilot-ready! In this video Drew Madelung and myself introduce this third pillar of SharePoint Premium.

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Video Summary

  • SharePoint Premium Advanced Management: Essential for getting your organization Copilot ready. Start with a few Copilot licenses or use a trial to explore its features.
  • Backup Solution: Microsoft 365 Backup costs $0.15 USD per gigabyte of protected content per month, ensuring data safety and recoverability beyond the 93-day recycle bin period.
  • Archive Feature: Helps manage storage costs by moving inactive content to a lower-cost storage tier. Costs are associated with archiving and unarchiving content, but it optimizes primary storage.
  • SharePoint Embedded: Allows building custom applications using SharePoint’s backend without the traditional UI. Involves costs related to storage and API transactions, offering flexibility for developers.
  • Trial Availability: Try SharePoint Premium Advanced Management with a 30-day trial (extendable to 60 days) to explore its features and benefits for your organization.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to part 20 of the ultimate SharePoint Premium deep dive series. In this video, we will talk about content governance and we will really introduce this third pillar of SharePoint Premium. For those of you brand new to the series, we have over 30 different videos covering everything SharePoint Premium. If you want to check all the rest of them, you’ll have a playlist in the description below. But for now, for this video, I’m joined by Drew Madelung. Drew, welcome back.

Thank you, Vlad. Glad to be here.

Well, thank you so much for being back. We’ve covered a lot in this series so far, especially for those of you who have followed it in order. We are on part 20, but we are now opening a new chapter, opening a new pillar in SharePoint Premium and not a small one. It has over 25 to 30 features if we break them down. So how would you describe the content governance pillar?

So if you recall in the other series episodes that you watched, SharePoint Premium is broken up into three pillars and this content governance pillar really focuses on the IT professional and SharePoint administrator side that we’ve been lacking over the years, most recently in SharePoint Online. So what content governance in SharePoint Premium gives us is a collection of features that help improve the storage of your organization, and the storage of your SharePoint environment, and add more robust security and compliance controls and reporting that we didn’t have in the past. So we have our core feature as part of content governance is SharePoint Advanced Management. So SharePoint Advanced Management is again another deeper collection of features as Vlad talked about. We have probably over 15 to 20 SharePoint Advanced Management features we’ll be going through in detail. But SharePoint Advanced Management by itself gives us an advanced set of security, compliance, and lifecycle tools to manage our SharePoint Online environment. And as we use SharePoint Online, we’re going to end up starting to take up a lot more storage. So what do we do? We have to have better governance of our storage. To do that, we have more advanced backup and archiving solutions now available to us as part of SharePoint Premium to give us more cost-effective ways to if we do need to keep that data for too long if we want to back data up inside of Microsoft, we now have storage solutions to do that all hosting our files inside of SharePoint. That’s a problem that more and more companies are having is that we’ve been dumping all that data into SharePoint, migrating file shares, everything is how do we manage the lifecycle and our storage in Microsoft 365. I finally started working with customers who have actually filled up their tenants. I didn’t think it would be possible. We have, I have multiple customers that have hit that scenario and we need to have more advanced solutions to provide that and the content governance solutions as part of SharePoint Premium does that. And the last one is part of content governance, we actually have our developer friends that are in this space. We might not always want to have SharePoint look like SharePoint, so we have some, we have SharePoint Embedded now that allows us to provide more of the full SharePoint functionality without having to have the SharePoint UI in front of it and actually make Graph and API calls back. We can build our own custom applications using the SharePoint backend to build whatever we would like on top of it.

And we’ll talk a bit more about it in just a few seconds, but as somebody that comes from an intranet background and as you know, I worked for an intranet company for so long, where was this five years ago? I really wish I had it. It would have saved me so much. But let’s still deep dive into each one of them and we will talk about SAM first. But I have a question for you, Drew. So it’s SharePoint Premium Advanced Management technically, right? So why isn’t the acronym SPAM? Why isn’t it called SPAM?

It should be called SPAM. If we were able to name them, Vlad, I think we would call it SPAM. But as one of my favorite features, I think, and as you kind of see in the series, the complexities in SharePoint Premium is that it is an umbrella of solutions and not just a single solution itself. And SharePoint Advanced Management has one that became part of the SharePoint Premium family as the brand expanded. And I think the best part about looking at SharePoint Advanced Management is one of the things that are near and dear to us. What’s the backend of SharePoint of SAM? Everything SharePoint, right? So we’ve done videos in the past about SharePoint Administration. This is truly the functionality that we’re going to be receiving within the content governance landscape. But this is our SharePoint. If you’re a SharePoint administrator, this is the pillar that you’re going to want to be going down because it will provide the most information and the most benefit that you have as a SharePoint admin. I always joke about it don’t listen to the Exchange admins, and don’t listen to the Skype or Teams admins. SharePoint is the most important part of Microsoft 365. Don’t listen to anybody else.

But if we look at some of the features and let me go through some of them as we talk about it, the way that I think about SAM and correct me if you see it differently, it allows you to find the problems in your environment. This is where data access governance comes in, over-shared sites, enterprise applications that have too much access to your sites, and things like that. And then you have about 15 different tools to solve those problems. So I’ll name them and you describe them, Drew. How about that? You do a quick overview. So data access governance.

So data access governance gives us a collection of reports that allows us to find different information in our organization, such as sharing links, sensitive information, and some of the over-permissioned sites that you have in your organization to be able to give you ammunition or materials to be able to say, what do we want to do with all of this stuff? What do we have to share? Do we have sensitive information that’s being shared externally or with everyone? We can use the data access governance reports within our tenant as part of SharePoint Advanced Management to find that information for you.

Awesome. And what if we find that information, like say we have a site that is super over-shared, where do site access reviews, for example, come in?

So we’re in IT. We don’t know what actually happens inside of people’s sites. We tell people we know everything. We know everything, but we can’t make decisions as part of that content, right? So when we find something, the concept of something being over-shared and governing that content, you need to be able to push back to the data owners, the data stewards. And what we can do with site access reviews is run a report, we see this content shared with everyone in the organization. We can say, hey, we need you guys to go verify that that’s actually meant to be shared with everyone in the organization. So we can trigger a site access review built right into SharePoint to let the users and the site owners dictate if the sharing and access controls that have already been set on your site today are valid. Let them approve it and let the administrators actually track them.

I love that because like you said, even if we know everything, we want to empower the business users to do more. So why not let them make the choice? They know their project. Give that responsibility to them. But sometimes there are sites that are so over-shared that we might not have time to do a site access review. We’re like, Houston, we have a problem. How do we stop it? And this is where restricted access control comes in for SharePoint and OneDrive.

So you find something that has too much information, right? You run the report and we’ve run an access review, but you know that we don’t always trust the users that we have. What we can now do with SharePoint Advanced Management is add restricted access controls onto a SharePoint site that doesn’t have to be group-backed. It can be just a SharePoint site and we can actually put in controls to say only certain people can access that site and only certain people would be able to share from that site. So I could say I have a very highly sensitive site that’s only where HR personnel files are. We see sensitive information. We know it has to be there, but we can put a restricted policy control in place to say only people in this HR Microsoft 365 group have the ability to have access, have the ability to share, and then in turn be able to keep that content restricted for Copilot in the future.

Awesome. And Copilot I think is a big part of what we’re trying to fix here, get everything Copilot ready. But we didn’t have, okay, so we kind of tried to fix everything. We discovered our sites, started access reviews, and things like that. What about sites that are inactive? Because sometimes, you know, we keep stuff forever. And is there a way for us to figure out what sites are inactive or maybe even ownerless? Because we said we want to give the site access review to the owner. What if there is no owner because they left the company, they got laid off and nobody ever filled that permission?

Yeah. So when we’re thinking about content governance, we have to think about the content lifecycle. In other session series in this, as part of SharePoint Premium videos, we’ve talked about ways you can manage content lifecycle. But we have site lifecycle management now as part of SharePoint Advanced Management, which allows us to do two primary things. One, which is to identify owners and two, which is to be able to provide a lifecycle inactive site policy against that to say, are these sites being active? Let the owners dictate their decision. So if a site’s been inactive for 90-plus days, we could say let the owners go decide if we want to keep that site or move it to another storage platform which we’ll talk about in a minute.

Awesome. And this is just a quick overview of SharePoint Premium Advanced Management. We will deep dive into each one of those in their own dedicated video, but I think this gives everybody a good idea of what are the kinds of things we can solve with SAM or SPAM. But let’s talk about the other things in content governance and let’s talk about storage, which as you said, four years ago I would have said we’re never going to get here, but here we are. The bar at the top right of the SharePoint admin center starts filling up. We have to either get rid of some of that content, but it’s not always easy. We have to find a way how keep it but cheaper. And this is where the archive comes in. Like I know it’s not in order, I have a backup on the slide here first, but let’s talk with the archive.

So what happens if you have that lifecycle policy, you have an inactive site that occurs and you want to get rid of it from search where we want to say we want to be able to keep it and potentially bring it back after a period of time. The big thing we hear from customers and the clients I work with is I don’t know if I should keep it or not. I’m in the IT world, I don’t know if I need to keep it. We haven’t gone through a full purview retention and records management solution and we want to keep it here but we don’t want to make it available to Copilot. We don’t want to make it available to our users. We’ve done certain scenarios in the past as SharePoint admins where we’ve made things read-only through our own processes or tools. But what we now have as part of SharePoint Premium is the ability to use M365 archive and either manually archive our SharePoint sites or automatically archive our SharePoint sites using Advanced using our SharePoint Advanced Management policies which puts it into a different storage tier, locks a site, removes from Copilot and allows us as administrators to bring it back if we need to.

And I think asks a lot about the cost savings you mentioned puts it in a different storage tier which is cold storage and that can help us save money which is good. We want to save money as much as I love Microsoft. If we can save money, pay a bit less licenses, everybody will be happy.

Yeah, if your tenant’s storage is running out, this pillar of videos will be perfect for you. And now let’s talk about backup. I feel like every IT admin knows backup. Every IT admin knows they should have a backup. But I feel like on-prem, everybody had their backup game A+. Everybody knew they had to do it. Everybody was doing it. As we moved to the cloud, a lot of people, a lot of admins were like, I’ll let Microsoft deal with it. But a lot of people didn’t know that there’s no built-in backup in Microsoft 365 until now. And how long has that recycle bin, right? If someone deletes something from their OneDrive, how long is that recycle bin?

You’d have 93 days.

93 days, right. And there is no backup beyond that. So to your point, there’s a big concern that continuously happens as part of this organization, as part of SharePoint Online, which is what happens if I accidentally delete something? How do we get it back? What if it was important to us and we weren’t ready from a records management perspective? Or what happens in the worst-case scenario? What happens if something happens to Microsoft? What happens if there is a breach or there’s an incident? How can you ensure that you have your email and your files in a spot that you can recover them in a way that you need to?

But I think even without going that far, just a malicious user. Drew is mad that he didn’t get that promotion. He has SharePoint admin rights or even just user rights and he can delete stuff from the recycle bin. Even as an admin, you can go in, delete a full SharePoint site, go into the recycle bin, and permanently delete it. How do you restore from that? And we have had third-party vendors forever from AvePoint to Veeam to many other third-party vendors. But now we have a built-in solution with Microsoft 365 Backup, which is just amazing because it only takes a few clicks. And there’s still a big differentiator between what backup can do and how granular you can go into backing up, restoring, things like that. We’ll of course have the deep dive video into backup, but it’s amazing that any admin now with just a few clicks can have a backup up to one year.

Up to a year.

Up to a year. But again, we’ll talk more about the limitations in the deep dive video because depending on your regulations, it might not be the best solution for you. But again, more on that. And finally, we have the applications sub-pillar. I know we’re not supposed to use that word, but the application sub-pillar is only SharePoint Embedded. As part of SharePoint Embedded, I mentioned it before, but this is going to be your pro-dev side of the world as part of content governance. There are plenty of scenarios. An intranet example is a perfect one. But if you want to build your own applications and work inside of SharePoint documents, document libraries, and file experience, but not have to have a full SharePoint site. So if I just want to have an application that I upload documents into I build my own SPFx web part to render that information or temporarily put documents in there. But what Embedded gives you, since it’s part of M365 and part of SharePoint Online, you get the full advantage of search, Copilot, eDiscovery, Purview, DLP, versioning, and everything SharePoint without the UI.

Yep, you build your own UI on top of everything you love about SharePoint.

Absolutely. That’s the way I love to say it. Take everything you love about the SharePoint features. Most people just don’t like the UI. You build your own UI, but you keep all the good stuff.

You get metadata in it too.

You get metadata, Purview, everything.

So how does that work, Vlad? Is it free?

Well, that’s the question. Do we talk about licensing? That’s always the toughest topic in any presentation because, well, I think we both have our PhD. We spent the last few days learning SAM licensing. So let’s talk about it. And let’s start with SharePoint Advanced Management. We just had something new from Ignite, which is not that long ago. It used to be $3 per user per month for SAM. And what made it difficult is that you needed everybody in the tenant to have it. So if you had 10,000 users, $30,000 per month, that’s a lot of money.

Yes.

However, now if you have one Copilot license in your tenant, you get SharePoint Premium Advanced Management enabled for everything. And again, look at it from the point of view that Microsoft sees SharePoint Premium Advanced Management as a way for companies to get Copilot ready. The goal is for everybody to use SharePoint Premium Advanced Management, get Copilot ready, and then roll out Copilot to the whole organization. But technically, you can have just a few Copilot licenses, just have your small pilot, and everything would work.

Right. And absolutely. And if you’re not ready for Copilot yet and you still want to work to try SharePoint Advanced Management, there is a trial that you can enable your tenant to go look at the different features. So as you go through these subsequent videos, if you want to come along with us, and get a tenant, you can enable the trial and you can walk through each of the video series that we have to talk about and see the different scenarios or solutions that we have as part of SAM.

Now let’s talk about backup. Backup is fairly easy. 15 cents USD, if I remember correctly, per gig of content that you protect. So if you have 100 gigs in SharePoint, 100 gigs in OneDrive, 100 gigs in Exchange, again, kind of just gave you a little asterisk and everything, you have 300 gigs protected. You do that times 0.15, which gives you your cost per month. So I think you have it here for about 3 terabytes, it would be $500 a month.

Very reasonable.

Absolutely, to be honest. Then archive. Now archive, it’s a bit more complicated because it depends on your situation. But I’ll let you take this one.

Yeah, so archive, the nuance with the archive is costs are implicated when you’re for storage and also the reactivation and the application or I would say the archiving action itself. So there’s the when you archive something and you unarchive something, there’s a cost as part of that. And then when your storage cost, when your storage quota is full when it gets to the end, you will start to incur storage cost at a lower cost tier than it is to have overall SharePoint Online storage. So in our video about M365 Archive, we’ll go deeper into how the storage is broken down, but just know that there is a cost implication when you utilize athe rchive, and it is based on the consumption that you have.

Awesome. And finally, we have SharePoint Embedded. I feel like nothing is free; everything has a price tag to it. It’s a premium product, right?

The premium product. Well, there is a part of SharePoint Embedded that is kind of free. Loop is part of SharePoint Embedded. People don’t know, but Loop is using SharePoint Embedded, and there are a lot of things using SharePoint Embedded. Well, it still charges for it because it comes towards your SharePoint pool storage, but if you want to use it for your custom applications, well, we have three pricing models. It all depends on what’s coming in, right? So when I’m hosting data inside of a SharePoint Embedded container, I’m going to be paying for the cost of that container along with the data moving in and out of it. That would be the best way to say it. So we have files held in a spot, files held in a container, we have to have transactions coming in and out, and we have to deal with either the storage or the API calls against that. So again, we’ll go much deeper into that video on SharePoint Embedded, but be aware that when you’re building your custom applications, if you want to work with this and work with us in these videos, there will be a little bit of consumption cost in a very, very micro sense, micro sense point of view, as part of that product.

Awesome. And we didn’t really mention it, but if you don’t have Copilot, you have a lab environment, you just want to try SharePoint Premium Advanced Management, you have a trial. Start the trial. So you just have to go in, start the trial, you can get, they give you 25 users, but I guess even with one, with one we’re good, everything will work, and you get 30 days. And after that, you just go extend, you can get another 30 days, and you are good to go. So you can get 60 days to play with it, which is really fun for us doing presentations, demos, things like that. So feel free to go around and play with it.

Well, I think this is it for this introduction to SharePoint Premium Advanced Management content governance pillar. Wow, that was a mouthful. But any final words before we go deep dive into each one of those products?

I think as we look at content governance, it’s important to remember that we all have a lot of content, and this content governance section will have a lot of these three different sub-pillars, as we say. So there is a very large collection of features, but this is one that really, for you, if you’re a SharePoint admin, this is the series, the pillar I think you’re going to want to follow the most to understand how you can improve your content governance, and especially if you’re getting Copilot ready, SAM is going to be what we’re looking at.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much everyone for watching. Make sure you like the video, sand ubscribe to the channel. This way you get notified as soon as more deep dive videos get added. So thank you for watching and see you soon.