SharePoint Premium as an intelligent platform for document processing and ECM

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, documents are a fact of life. However, while indispensable, they also present a clear challenge.

Each document must be processed efficiently and accurately - and this can take a lot of time and resources with manual methods.

To meet this challenge, an organization must leverage automation wherever possible, without sacrificing quality or compliance.

It’s easy to overthink this, because the solution might be right under your nose.

In this newsletter, I’m going to highlight how SharePoint Premium builds on the capabilities of Microsoft Syntex and Azure AI Cognitive Services to provide a complete solution for document processing, lifecycle management, and information governance – in one platform.

SharePoint Premium as an AI-powered document processing platform

There is a natural lifecycle for all documents that enter your organization: they’re created, received, processed, used, stored, and (eventually) deleted.

Sounds simple, right?

However, some key facts govern the reality of document processing:

• Each document type has a unique process – it must flow to the right teams and follow certain rules for retention, security, and access.
• Documents often must be retained for a defined period and must be auditable at any time.
• Inbound (or freshly created) documents are highly variable, with many different information types, layouts, formats, file types.
• Metadata is essential to use documents correctly, but this isn’t always complete, and adding metadata manually is a drain on resources.

By using SharePoint’s intelligent document processing capabilities, documents can flow through your organization in the exact right way, with minimal burden.

Let’s drill-down the most important parts of this solution.

1: Extracting knowledge from content with AI

Using optical character recognition (OCR) enhanced with AI, SharePoint can extract the knowledge from text and non-text files including scans, PDFs, and images.

You have a choice of pretrained and customizable AI models for recognizing key information, based on the context of your organization.

SharePoint Premium has several AI models for knowledge extraction:

• Image recognition: Combined with Power Automate and Azure Cognitive Services you can recognize and classify objects in images and extract information from scanned documents such as business cards, or ID documents.
• Pretrained models: These can extract knowledge from the most common document types, including invoices, contracts, and receipts.
• Customizable models: For organization-specific documents, you can train a model based on your own business examples.
• Document and video translation: Automatically translate a wide variety of document types including video transcripts.

2: ‘Tag and Bag’ inbound documents

Unlike knowledge extraction (above) this is about labeling content correctly.

As documents flow into (and through) your organization you need to capture and classify the information they contain.

This is especially important for sensitive information, but also so that documents are found and used effectively during their entire lifecycle.

• Automatic metadata extraction: Using a powerful inference engine, SharePoint Premium automatically matches terms in new documents with your own metadata taxonomy.
• Taxonomy tagging: Automatically tag content with predefined keywords or topic categories such as regions, product names, business units, or departments. This enables you to effectively filter content and use in business processes via Power Automate.
• Content query: Easily perform advanced searches of content using metadata to organize and filter results.

3: Streamlining content creation

By automating and streamlining the creation process, newly created content always aligns with prescribed formats and is published with minimal friction.

• Content Assembly: This feature uses standardized templates and layouts to rapidly assemble new documents with personalized data and dynamic content.
• Automated approval flows: Power Automate takes your new documents through your review and approval process with near-zero effort.
• Annotation: Numerous file formats can be directly annotated from the file viewer, streamlining collaboration.
• eSignatures: Finalized PDF documents (such as contracts) can be securely signed within SharePoint Premium, and integrations with Adobe Acrobat Sign and DocuSign are already on the horizon.

4: Effortless lifecycle management

Storage costs money. So a rigorous lifecycle policy is needed to ensure that documents are kept for a defined period and deleted (or archived) after that point.

This tackles the problem of ‘zombie content’ – all those documents and other content that have exceeded their useful lifespan but persist anyway due to insufficient metadata or retention policy enforcement.

• Automated lifecycle enforcement: Documents with all the right metadata are easily forwarded to the right business processes, approval processes, teams, and deleted at its end-of-life, in line with retention policies.
• Cost-efficient auto-archiving: SharePoint Archive can retain inactive SharePoint sites in a cost-effective archive, when required for compliance or internal policies.
• Backup and archive: Restore SharePoint sites from a backup in case of ransomware, accidental deletion, or corruption.

5: Information security and access management

Information security and governance are especially important when integrating AI or automations - SharePoint offers several important features for safeguarding this.

• Classification and metadata: This lays the groundwork for automatically enforcing information security and compliance with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle and Records Management features.
• AI-detection of sensitive content: Automatically recognizes sensitive data and applies the correct labels.
• Rule supremacy: Even if users make mistakes with manual tagging, the rules will always override these and effortlessly ensure information security across huge volumes of content.

• Granular access control: Admins can restrict access with fine-grained criteria like identity, device, location, or network, and enforce authentication methods or overriding retention labels.

A powerful single platform for ‘cradle-to-grave’ content management

As we’ve seen, SharePoint Premium provides substantial business value by automating the identification, extraction, and classification of documents. This preserves the context and intelligently guides each document through its lifecycle.

The more content is kept within SharePoint Premium, the more you can benefit.

It also unlocks numerous opportunities for automation, provides a clear overview of usage patterns and risks, and enables you to safely leverage AI to enhance processes with greater productivity - making a strong incentive for migration to this versatile, well-supported platform.

About Xillio

Xillio software empowers organizations to maximize their Microsoft 365 investments by offering a robust platform for content migration and integration. Tailored to enhance the SharePoint experience, our platform not only simplifies the migration of valuable data into Microsoft 365 but also enables the integration of diverse sources for Copilot utilization.

Xillio is proud to be a Microsoft Content AI preferred partner.