Five SharePoint Advanced Management features you should be using (especially if you’ve enabled Copilot)

If your organization is rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot, chances are you’ve started evaluating how content is structured, accessed, and governed in SharePoint Online. But there’s one powerful toolset many Copilot-enabled organizations are overlooking—despite already having access to it: SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM).

Included with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, SAM provides enhanced governance capabilities that can help IT teams enforce cleaner structures, secure content, and improve Copilot results—without reinventing the wheel.

Here are five features you should be using right now.

1. Permission Insights for Every Site

With Copilot sourcing from content users already have access to, permission mismanagement is a major risk—and a major productivity blocker.

SAM provides Permission Insights at the site level, allowing admins to:

• Visualize who has access (internal and external)
• Detect broken inheritance and oversharing
• Drill down to specific users and sharing links
• Remediate risks directly from the interface

Why it matters for Copilot: Clean, intentional access supports relevant, safe Copilot results.

2. Sharing Link Reviews and Expiration Controls

Anonymous or outdated sharing links can create blind spots—both for IT and for Copilot. SAM gives you centralized control over how links behave, including:

• Requiring expiration dates for anyone links
• Viewing all active sharing links across sites
• Identifying users who’ve created external shares
• Enforcing policies on link scope (organization-only, people with link, etc.)

Why it matters for Copilot: Eliminates the chance of AI surfacing data that was accidentally shared or forgotten.

3. Inactive Site Lifecycle Management

Every tenant has a long tail of old, unused sites—left behind by past projects, teams, or migrations. These clutter search, reduce trust, and confuse Copilot.

SAM helps you:

• Identify inactive sites based on usage data
• Notify site owners to review or archive
• Automatically delete or retire stale content
• Create lifecycle policies for different site types

Why it matters for Copilot: Improves the signal-to-noise ratio in your SharePoint data.

4. Ownership Delegation and Access Review

Governance fails when no one knows who owns the content. SAM introduces tools to:

• Assign clear site owners
• Require periodic access reviews
• Ensure sites have a responsible party for structure and permissions
• Support scalable governance in large environments

Why it matters for Copilot: Sites with no clear owner often go stale, unstructured, or over-permissive—all problems for AI.

5. Change History and Audit Visibility

SAM provides historical visibility into changes made to:

• Sharing policies
• External access configurations
• Site-level permissions
• Expiration and ownership settings

These logs support proactive governance, compliance, and internal policy enforcement, all of which are critical in regulated industries.

Why it matters for Copilot: Helps IT trace unexpected content surfacing behavior and tighten governance iteratively.

Bonus: You Probably Already Have Access

If you’ve licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot, you already have SharePoint Advanced Management. The capabilities are part of the Microsoft Syntex – SharePoint Advanced Management plan, now bundled with eligible Copilot SKUs.

That means no extra licensing steps—just configuration, enablement, and strategy.

How SoftwareOne Helps

We help organizations operationalize SAM as part of their broader SharePoint governance and Copilot readiness strategy, including:

• Activating and configuring SAM features
• Auditing your current environment using Permission Insights
• Establishing site lifecycle and ownership models
• Building governance dashboards for continuous improvement
• Aligning SAM with Microsoft Purview and Copilot knowledge source planning