Tag: Microsoft 365 Syntex

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Microsoft 365 Backup and Archive


Microsoft Inspire 2023 saw the announcement of two services that have been long awaited:

  • Microsoft 365 Backup
  • Microsoft 365 Archive

While 3rd-parties such as AvePoint, Veritas, Veeam, and SkyKick have offerings, many customers have wanted a native Microsoft product.

Microsoft 365 Backup

This provides protection and restore for:

  • OneDrive
  • SharePoint
  • Exchange

and keeps all data within the Microsoft 365 security boundary. You will be able to:

  • Backup all or select SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes in your tenant.
  • Restore files, sites, and mailbox items in your tenant in parallel to a prior point-in-time in a granular manner or at massive scale.
  • Search or filter content in your backups using key metadata such as item or site names, owners, or event types within specific restore point date ranges.

It will be accessed via the M365 Admin Center.

Microsoft 365 Archive

This will provide a cold storage tier within SharePoint for old/inactive data at a “cost effective price”. This will allow you to:

  • Select and archive or reactivate full sites in place without needing to migrate your data outside of Microsoft. File level archiving will be coming in the second half of 2024.
  • Maintain full admin-level search, eDiscovery, access policy, sensitivity label, DLP (Data Loss Prevention), retention policy, access control settings, and other security and compliance functionality.

Site-level archiving will be the only option at first until file-level archiving arrives mid-2024.

Overview

Sensibly, Microsoft have made APIs available for both services so partners (such as those mentioned above) can make use of this functionality too. Both of these new services are powered by Microsoft Syntex, a set of tools/products that is yet to truly find its place but is clearly becoming utilised more by Redmond.

You can see more info here and sign up for the previews of these products here.

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Microsoft SharePoint Syntex – what is it?


SharePoint Syntex was added to the Microsoft Product Terms in October 2020 – but what is it?

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Project Cortex

First of all – we need to consider Project Cortex. This is a Microsoft program to weave Artificial Intelligence (AI) into a range of their products to help users and serves as something of an “umbrella”. SharePoint Syntex is the first product “from” Project Cortex but there are clear plans from Microsoft for several more to follow.

What does SharePoint Syntex do?

Introducing the concept of “topic centers”, SharePoint Syntex aims to automatically replicate the way that humans process documents including recognizing content, extracting information, and applying metadata tags. It works across Office docs, PDFs, and images and is another example of Microsoft’s move towards Robotic Process Automation (RPA) – alongside their advances with the Power Platform and Microsoft 365 E3.

For organisations processing a lot of data within documents – such as CVs, proposals, articles etc. – this could represent a new way for them to work smarter, not harder. Utilising AI to perform many of these tasks will free up human users for higher value projects. Microsoft are working on connectors to enable organisations to pull data from 3rd party systems into the Microsoft Graph and then utilise it within SharePoint Syntex.

At launch, it only supports English and Microsoft plan to add additional languages “in 2021”. They do say however, that you can create bespoke “topics” in any language and that certain functions, such as processing forms content, are language agnostic.

Taken from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/sharepoint-syntex?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

Licensing

SharePoint Syntex is available as an add-on license for commercial Microsoft 365 customers and costs $5 per user per month. It appears to be available for the Microsoft 365 Business SKUs as well as the Enterprise suites.

Anyone who will be “using, consuming, or otherwise benefitting from” the capabilities of SharePoint Syntex will need a license. Microsoft list out a range of scenarios that require licenses including where users:

  • Access a Content Center
  • Create a document understanding model in a Content Center
  • Upload content to a library where a document understanding model is associated (whether in a Content Center or elsewhere)
  • Manually execute a document understanding model
  • View a library where a document understanding model is associated
  • Create a forms processing model via the entry point in a SharePoint library
  • Upload content to a library where a forms processing model is associated
  • View a library where a forms processing model is associated

This creates a whole new set of circumstances for organisations to become under-licensed and to have those wonderful, bordering on the philosophical conversations with Microsoft like “What IS the definition of benefiting?”, “What exactly is a “capability”?” etc 😁

Further Reading

https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/project-cortex-microsoft-365/faq/

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