SharePoint Advanced Management Is Really a Copilot Readiness Tool

Organizations are rushing to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot, but in doing so, many are discovering that their biggest challenge isn’t AI adoption but years of unmanaged SharePoint content, inactive sites, and excessive permissions. SharePoint Advanced Management aims to solve those issues before they become Copilot problems.

What is SharePoint Advanced Management?

SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) is a Microsoft 365 governance solution that helps administrators identify stale, risky, or overshared content in SharePoint and OneDrive while improving readiness for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The add-on helps to prevent oversharing, while also making lifecycle management easier and reducing content sprawl. It helps admins to answer questions such as:

• Which sites are no longer being used?
• Which sites no longer have an owner?
• What content is being shared too broadly?
• Which permissions have become risky?

The SharePoint Advanced Management tools are accessible through the SharePoint Admin Center or through PowerShell. And while these tools are indeed SharePoint oriented, Microsoft has been increasingly positioning them as a Copilot Readiness solution.

Licensing should be part of the SAM decision, not an afterthought

Before treating SharePoint Advanced Management as the answer to every Copilot governance problem, check whether the licensing model makes sense for the tenant you actually run. SAM requires eligible Microsoft 365 or Office 365 licensing, and organizations should confirm entitlement before building it into a Copilot readiness plan.

The more important decision is whether the additional SAM licensing is justified by the scale and risk of the SharePoint environment. Tenants with large site estates, inactive sites, weak ownership, or broad internal sharing are more likely to need the add-on before Copilot rollout. Smaller or well-controlled environments may be better served by fixing the basics first and using SAM only where specific capabilities, such as restricted site creation, justify the extra cost.

Why Copilot has made SharePoint governance a priority

Microsoft created Microsoft 365 Copilot with governance in mind. To this end, Copilot doesn’t simply ignore SharePoint permissions, it respects them. That adherence to permissions is important from a security standpoint, but it also means that if governance is weak then SharePoint data could potentially be exposed through Copilot.

The reason why this might happen stems from the fact that Copilot uses Microsoft Graph as a means of accessing the organization’s data. This reliance on Microsoft Graph means that Copilot is free to use any data that a user has access to. So with that in mind, imagine what would happen if a confidential folder containing sensitive data has been accidentally shared with everyone except external users. To date, the overshared folder might have escaped notice. Even though everyone in the organization technically has access to the folder, it’s entirely possible that nobody will ever see it unless someone actively searches on something that aligns with the folder’s contents.

Copilot completely changes this risk. As Copilot formulates answers to user’s prompts, it uses any relevant information that the user has access to. So even if the user has never gone looking for anything related to the confidential folder, the folder’s contents could potentially be exposed to the user anyway through a Copilot response. In other words, Copilot has made the overshared information easier to discover.

Another risk associated with Copilot is that outdated content can potentially reduce the quality and accuracy of Copilot’s responses. Remember, Copilot is designed to leverage any information that the user has access to when formulating a response. However, Copilot has no way of knowing if the information contained within a document is current or if that information is outdated and no longer accurate. The mere presence of outdated documents can cause Copilot to provide users with information that is no longer accurate. That being the case, content lifecycle management becomes an essential part of ensuring Copilot’s accuracy.

While it is easy to see how data governance problems can impact Copilot, there is an extremely important distinction to keep in mind. Specifically, Copilot doesn’t create governance problems, it makes existing governance problems easier to find.

The four capabilities that matter most

Although SharePoint Advanced Management offers numerous features and capabilities, there are four capabilities that tend to be far more essential than the others.

Inactive sites are a Copilot quality problem, not just storage clutter

The first of the essential capabilities is site lifecycle management. In most organizations, SharePoint experiences continuous growth as data accumulates. The problem however, is that very little of this data ever gets deleted. It’s not at all uncommon for organizations to have abandoned project sites from years ago, duplicate document libraries, and other content that is no longer useful to the organization.

One of SharePoint Advanced Management’s most useful capabilities is that of helping admins to identify inactive SharePoint sites so that the organization can either archive or delete those sites. Change history reports can help an organization to keep track of any changes made to sites within the last six months. Inactive site policies are also useful for identifying sites that are no longer being used.

Site lifecycle management goes beyond just reducing storage costs, it reigns in content sprawl. When an organization is able to manage content sprawl, it can help Copilot to deliver better results since Copilot will no longer be ingesting outdated content. Managing content sprawl can also help Copilot to avoid the confusion that can occur when multiple, seemingly authoritative document sources contain contradictory information.

Ownerless sites become ungovernable when Copilot enters the tenant

SharePoint Advanced Management can also help organizations with ownership and accountability. A surprisingly large number of SharePoint sites can become owner-less over time. This loss of ownership can stem from any number of underlying causes such as employee resignations, corporate restructuring or mergers.

The problem with having owner-less sites is that they can become ungovernable. That’s because there is no designated owner who is responsible for permissions, content reviews, retention policies, or content lifecycle management within the site.

Internal oversharing is the Copilot risk most organizations underestimate

One of the single most important capabilities provided by SharePoint Content Management is protection against oversharing. There is often a natural tendency to think of oversharing as being the accidental public exposure of confidential data. More often however, oversharing is less dramatic and less noticeable, but not necessarily less damaging.

Often times, over sharing simply means that there are too many internal users who have access to a resource. This can happen because inherited permissions expand over time, because temporary permissions were never removed, or perhaps because the Everyone group was used for convenience.

Oversharing can be a huge problem because Copilot makes it a lot easier for employees to be exposed to information that they might otherwise have never had a reason to look for. SharePoint Advanced Management can help to identify high risk permissions so that those permissions can be revoked before they lead to unwanted data exposure and potential compliance violations.

Oversharing protection can be based on the use of conditional access policies. These policies can be applied directly to a SharePoint site, or they can be based on sensitivity labels.

SAM matters most when manual permission review no longer scales

The fourth capability that most organizations will find useful is governance visibility. Even though most admins are probably well aware of the dangers associated with excessive permissions, manually investigating permissions across thousands of sites just isn’t practical.

SharePoint Advanced Management provides visibility in the form of reports and auditing mechanisms. This helps IT move from reactive cleanup to proactive site governance.

How SharePoint Advanced Management prepares your tenant for Copilot

In practice, the first useful move is not to turn on every SAM policy at once. Start by finding the sites Copilot is most likely to surface in answers: broadly shared team sites, stale project sites, ownerless workspaces, and document libraries that still contain outdated but authoritative-looking content. Cleaning those areas first gives you a safer baseline before you expand governance across the rest of the tenant.

For an organization that is about to adopt Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Advanced Management is less of a product implementation and more of a governance workflow. This workflow consists of several steps, including:

1. Find the SharePoint risks Copilot will surface first

Because Copilot will have access to the same information as the users who will be using it, the first thing that needs to be done is to assess the environment. Simply put, you need to understand the environment before you deploy AI.

2. Remove outdated content before Copilot treats it as authoritative

Outdated content can be extremely problematic for AI models such as those used by Copilot. Copilot generates responses that are based directly on the data that it has access to. This means that if Copilot has access to outdated information, then Copilot responses are also likely to be incorrect. Outdated information can also sometimes conflict with current information found in other documents, thereby confusing Copilot. As such, it’s extremely important to remove inactive or outdated content before allowing Copilot to ingest that content.

3. Assign site ownership before governance becomes nobody’s job

Every site needs to have an owner who is responsible for its contents. Site ownership policies should be used to ensure that every site is owned by someone. This helps to ensure that sites remain relevant and that content stored within the site is being actively maintained according to the organization’s policies.

4. Fix excessive access before Copilot makes it searchable

The next step in the workflow is to review the access control permissions associated with the organization’s content. Remember, Copilot will discover and potentially expose anything that the users have access to. As such, it is important to make sure that you are eliminating unnecessary access and taking steps to actively prevent oversharing.

5. Prioritize authoritative content so Copilot has better sources

Once permissions have been reigned in, the next step involves improving the quality of the information contained within SharePoint. The better the information, the better the AI insights will be. As such, it’s worthwhile to look for ways to highlight authoritative content, remove outdated or obsolete documents, and remove or archive duplicate documents.

6. Deploy Copilot only after the tenant is cleaner and safer

The final step in the workflow is that of deploying Copilot. Because the organization has taken the time to curate its SharePoint resources, Copilot can be safely deployed.

Is SharePoint Advanced Management worth it?

There are obviously many benefits to using SharePoint Advanced Management, but is SharePoint Advanced Management worth the cost? Like any other software tool, some organizations will find SharePoint Advanced Management to be extremely worthwhile, while other organizations might not necessarily need it.

SAM is strongest for large, regulated, or messy SharePoint tenants

SharePoint Advanced Management tends to be a good fit in extremely large SharePoint environments where manual governance and cleanup is impractical. SharePoint Advanced Management is also a particularly good fit for larger organizations that are about to deploy Copilot or who are operating in regulated industries. Even smaller organizations might find SharePoint Advanced Management to be useful is their users frequently share data externally, or if they are trying to comply with governance maturity initiatives.

SAM is harder to justify when SharePoint is small or already controlled

SharePoint Advanced Management is probably going to be overkill for smaller organizations or for organizations that do not use SharePoint all that much. It may also be of limited benefit to organizations whose SharePoint environments are already well governed.

Treat SAM as Copilot preparation, not optional cleanup

If your organization is investing in Microsoft 365 Copilot, SharePoint Advanced Management should be viewed less as an optional governance tool and more as part of the preparation process.

SharePoint Advanced Management isn’t simply about cleaning up SharePoint. Its real value is helping organizations ensure that Copilot works with accurate, properly governed, and appropriately secured content. Many organizations are increasingly treating SharePoint Advanced Management as a foundational governance layer rather than an optional add-on.

Frequently asked questions