SharePoint Advanced Management: advanced governance and site control in Microsoft 365

Introduction

In recent years, SharePoint Online has become the heart of collaboration in Microsoft 365. With Teams, Planner, Loop and Viva, every team automatically creates one or more SharePoint sites, often without any real strategy for governance over time.

The result is well known: inactive sites, ownerless sites, access that is never reviewed, and difficulty demonstrating control and accountability over data. It is in this context that SharePoint Advanced Management was born, as a response to a concrete need to govern the environment, not simply to create it.

SAM

How SharePoint Advanced Management Came About

The features now included in SharePoint Advanced Management are not entirely new. Originally, these advanced governance tools were part of the Microsoft Syntex ecosystem, initially designed for the intelligent classification and processing of content.

Syntex already included key concepts such as:

advanced site management
lifecycle-based control policies
reporting on usage and ownership

However, the link with Syntex made these features less accessible, both in terms of licensing and in terms of conceptual positioning: governance tools “hidden” inside a solution focused on content.

The Evolution: From Syntex to SharePoint Advanced Management

As Microsoft 365 matured and governance became a major topic, Microsoft progressively separated the concept of content management from that of site management.

Out of this evolution came SharePoint Advanced Management as a standalone offering:

focused exclusively on SharePoint sites
geared towards policies, reporting and attestation
designed for enterprise environments and complex tenants

The key step was making these features more broadly available, no longer tied solely to Syntex.

SharePoint Advanced Management Today: Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Today, SharePoint Advanced Management is included when the tenant has at least one Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.

This is a fundamental point:

You do not need to assign Copilot to all users
A single Copilot licence in the tenant is enough
SharePoint Advanced Management features become available to administrators

This change of model makes SAM far more accessible and consistent with the idea of centralised governance, decoupled from end users’ direct use of Copilot.

In other words: Copilot also becomes a governance enabler, not just a productivity tool.

SAM

What SharePoint Advanced Management Enables

SharePoint Advanced Management provides concrete tools for governing the SharePoint environment over time, including:

Reports on inactive sites (Inactive Site Policy)
Control of site ownership (Site Ownership Policy)
Guided periodic attestations (Attestation Site Policy)

These features make it possible to move from reactive management to a continuous and measurable model.

Inactive Site Policy

The Inactive Site Policy makes it possible to identify SharePoint sites that show no activity for a defined period.

The reporting highlights:

inactive sites
last detected activity
site type
associated owners

It is a key tool for reducing sprawl and improving the overall security posture.

Site Ownership Policy

The Site Ownership Policy tackles one of the most critical problems: sites without owners.

Through dedicated reports, it makes it possible to identify:

sites with no owners
owners who are no longer active
missing accountability

Without a clearly defined owner, no governance strategy can be sustainable over time.

Attestation Site Policy

The Attestation Site Policy introduces a formal process for the periodic review of SharePoint sites.

Owners are asked to confirm that:

the site is still needed
access is correct
the content is still relevant

Attestations are tracked and archived, providing concrete evidence that is also useful for audit and compliance.

Conclusion

SharePoint Advanced Management grew out of the Microsoft Syntex experience, but today it represents something different: a modern governance platform, accessible and integrated into the heart of Microsoft 365.

The fact that it can be enabled with a single Microsoft 365 Copilot licence completely changes its positioning: from a “niche” feature to a strategic tool for any organisation that wants to govern SharePoint Online seriously.

In a constantly evolving tenant, governance is not a one-off project but a continuous process. SharePoint Advanced Management finally provides the right tools to tackle it in a structured and sustainable way.