SharePoint Premium was always great, but in the age of AI, it’s crucial to strong Microsoft digital workplace governance. Looking for a Guide to SharePoint Premium? How about one with 3 Microsoft MVPs?
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Video Summary
- Introduction to SharePoint Premium: This series explores SharePoint Premium, a suite of over 30 features designed to enhance Microsoft 365. It’s a collection of tools for everyone from IT professionals to information workers.
- Challenges with AI Readiness: Many organizations face difficulties getting AI-ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot due to data governance and security issues, leading to significant deployment delays.
- Importance of Content Quality: The effectiveness of Microsoft 365 Copilot depends on the quality of your content. SharePoint is essential as it houses all collaborative and shared content, crucial for smooth AI integration.
- Confusion Around Features: Frequent name changes and evolving features have caused confusion about what SharePoint Premium includes. This series aims to clarify these aspects and provide detailed insights into each feature.
- Comprehensive Coverage: The series will feature over 30 in-depth videos, covering technical details and practical applications. Specific playlists will cater to different roles, ensuring relevant information for everyone from IT pros to executives.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above! Confused about which AI functionality you’re trying to use? If you’re looking to learn how to build AI Agents in SharePoint, watch this video here.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone and welcome to the Ultimate SharePoint Premium Deep Dive series. If you’re listening to this video, it’s probably the first time you’ve heard about this series, so let me take a few minutes to introduce you to what this series is about. If we take a look at the last year, Microsoft really only had one single thing on their mind, and that is Copilot. It’s the only thing Microsoft has been pushing, the only thing Microsoft talked about in every single keynote, and the big topic of 2024 was how to get more people to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot. This is all pretty from a marketing and goals point of view, but if we take a look at the real world, most companies are not yet AI-ready. As much as we would love to be, many organizations have started doing their Microsoft 365 Copilot pilot or test deployments with just a few users and realized that they have data and governance problems. Whether it’s sites that are not correctly permissioned or they have a lot of old content that doesn’t make sense and confuses Copilot, many organizations have hit pause or had to slow down their deployment to get their environment AI-ready.
If we take a look, I know not everybody loves the Gartner surveys and all of that, but if we still take a look at the few studies we have, it says that around 64% of respondents in the Gartner survey on Microsoft 365 Copilot deployments reported that information governance and security risks required significant time and resources to deal with, with concerns about data oversharing causing about 40% of delays in the rollouts. If we take a look at the timing, it’s three months or more, so it’s not like a one or two-week delay; it’s a significant delay in the project. But where exactly is the problem? We all know that the big advantage of M365 Copilot versus ChatGPT, Anthropic, and all the other tools out there is that it’s grounded in your content. The better content you have, the better the AI will be. And where is that content? It is, of course, in my favorite tool in Microsoft 365, which is SharePoint. SharePoint is the tool that allows you to collaborate and share content, to create beautiful intranet sites. So really, all your intranet content is in there. And of course, at the end of the day, I’ll make it easy: all your content is in there. Even if people use it from the Files tab in Teams and people make jokes, it’s all about files. At the end of the day, all your content is in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business, which is still SharePoint at the end of the day. Microsoft sees over two billion new files added per day in SharePoint, which is huge. So Microsoft introduced this thing called SharePoint Premium. But what is SharePoint Premium? Many people think that SharePoint Premium is a product, but it’s not a product. It’s a suite of over 30 features divided into three pillars. Those features are not only for IT professionals; they’re for everyone, from information workers to knowledge managers, and IT professionals. And of course, because it’s Microsoft, they never make licensing easy. We have a few licensing methods in there, and to make things even more fun, it changed names quite a few times over the past few years.
Now, let’s get back to the series. Because there are so many features to cover, I am not doing this series alone. I have two amazing MVPs joining me today: Drew Madelung and Gokan Ozcifci. How are you both doing today? Great, not too bad, thank you. Well, thank you so much for being here and embarking on this journey with me, where hopefully we’re going to cover everything. But let’s start with some introductions. Most of you, well, if you’re on this channel, most of you already know me, so let’s focus on our guests. We’ll start with Drew Madelung. Drew, can you introduce yourself? Thanks for having me, Vlad. My name is Drew Madelung. I am a Microsoft 365 consultant, a longtime Microsoft MVP, and a longtime person who has been working on SharePoint since 2007. This is something that I’ve been looking forward to talking about. As a former or still IT professional but longtime SharePoint administrator, it finally feels like it’s time that we’ve gotten some SharePoint administrative features for us, and we are looking to go very deep into each of these features throughout this series.
Awesome. Let’s talk to Gokan next. Gokan, can you introduce yourself? Hello everyone. Well, to introduce myself, it’s not the first time on the channel with Vlad, but nevertheless, I am a SharePoint MVP from back in time, like almost 11-12 years with Vlad. We got MVPs at the same time. I am a Microsoft RD, author of multiple books, world traveller, and SharePoint Premium enthusiast. So, pretty excited to be here with both of my friends, talking about SharePoint Premium and doing all of those amazing videos. But let’s take a step back. Why did we even decide to do this thing? It’s been about one year exactly today. It was at Ignite 2023 that Microsoft officially gave a name to this SharePoint Premium thing. Drew, do you want to start on why we even, like, what was the problem? Why did we want to make this series? What we ran into is, that I’ve worked with a lot of different customers talked with different MVPs and attended different events, what actually is SharePoint Premium? We said it’s a suite, not a product, but how do these things work together? Why is SharePoint Premium even here? This series will go through in detail throughout the series about why this came to be, and break down the different features that we have so people understand what SharePoint Premium is and why it came to be a suite of products. Probably some of the historical side of this is, Gokan, we’ve all been working in certain parts of this for many years, not just the year that it has been out.
Awesome. Gokan, I always go to you for content, especially about SharePoint Premium’s content processing. How do you find the documentation of SharePoint Premium? Well, the documentation is good, but it’s not as we wish. As Drew has been mentioning, it is confusing when you have to actually deep dive and learn about the processing experience or any other pillar because we will deep dive into those three pillars. It’s changing so fast with all the new announcements, with all the naming changes you said. It’s just a big problem for us, for the information workers, for people who are going to sell it, use it, consume it, to keep track of it. To give you an example, Syntex was the former word right before SharePoint Premium. If you look at the documentation today, it’s still referred to as Syntex. I know some Microsoft people have promised us to change this a while ago, but it still hasn’t happened. We can’t say that the documentation is good if it still makes reference to a product that disappeared a year ago. That’s the reason why we’re here, I guess. Yeah, and there’s a lot of marketing stuff I find, but not a lot of how do I actually do it. It’s like, hey, here’s the feature, but it doesn’t tell me what are all the limitations, how do I actually make the best of it. I don’t know about you two, but one of the things I have as a problem is there are so many things that are announced, and I have no idea which one of them is actually there. There are things that we saw at Ignite last year around the documents hub for external sharing, about contracts management, and one year later, you would think that they’re actually there, but they are not. The combination of the features of that is part of SharePoint Premium is continuously evolving too. It’s not going back to a year ago. There have been additions and subtractions to what SharePoint Premium is, which leads to a lot of confusion around what, to your point, Vlad, is available. If I am an IT Pro, I turn on my admin center today, what should I be seeing based on the license that I have? We now have multiple different channels of licensing, so they can say if I license it this way, is that the right way to do it? There’s some major confusion on what’s available, how to get that, and when that would be available inside of your organization. To conclude this, what we have been agreeing with Drew is that SharePoint Premium is an umbrella term for all the artifacts or the suite we have for us to use. SharePoint Premium is like the umbrella, and all the features are behind that or below that that we could use and consume for organizations. For the next-gen content services, let’s call it that. I love calling it the umbrella term, and that’s the easiest way to explain to those who have never used SharePoint Premium to realize how easily it could be used in an organization. You can’t go out and buy SharePoint Premium, right? You can’t buy that today. You can’t go into the admin center and purchase SharePoint. It’s not a license.
Our plan is to build over 30 deep-dive videos covering everything SharePoint Premium. There are so many, I didn’t even really get a chance to put all of them on a single slide. Let’s break it down. Gokan, what are some of our goals for the series? We want to make sure that everyone on the planet understands, well, at least people using the ecosystem, understand what SharePoint Premium is and how they can get all the benefits of the SharePoint Premium features. Especially, we are IT people, right? We can talk about marketing and licensing stories, but the whole idea is to show you how things are working and not working. The whole idea is after the video, you would actually have a great understanding of the artifacts in SharePoint Premium. Awesome. And as you said, focus on tech, not marketing. Drew, what do we want to do with this when we focus on the technology? We know we have that audience of IT pros, right? That’s an audience that we feel has been left behind in a lot of the documentation and videos that are out there. So, we’re going to bring the materials and details around these SharePoint Premium features, talk about the tech and how it works, and with that, make sure we, as part of this series, understand why this matters to the other side of the business. Why is SharePoint Advanced Management important? Why is some of the content processing important in your organization? To show you some of the benefits of the features, not just the tech as well.
Awesome. And of course, the regular updates. As much as we would love to go back in a way, oh yes and no, from a content creator’s perspective, I’d love to create content about SharePoint and then be good for three years. That’s not the case anymore, so we’re going to have to keep it up to date. Because we know that there’s such a big audience for it, we are going to create quite a few playlists. Whatever your job role is, there will be a playlist for you. We will, of course, have the full SharePoint Premium in-depth series with all the videos, but we’ll also have a video or playlist for each pillar, which is SharePoint Premium Experiences, SharePoint Premium Processes, and SharePoint Premium Governance. If you have no idea what those are right now, that’s okay. We’ll explain those pillars and what they mean in the next video, so don’t worry if you have no idea what they are.
Also, we’ll have a playlist for executives and sales. If you just want to know enough to talk about it in a meeting or to understand if somebody technically explains it to you, we will have that playlist for you that won’t go too deep into the details but just enough so you know what everybody else is talking about in that meeting. So, make sure you follow the VX Channel on YouTube, and turn on notifications so you’re notified as soon as a video is posted. You’ll have all the links to the playlists in the description below, as well as the socials for Drew and Gokan. Make sure you connect with them on LinkedIn, follow them on Twitter, or whatever your favorite social media is. You’ll have all the links down below. Thank you so much for watching this video, and we’re looking forward to seeing you soon.
