According to Microsoft, about 1.6 billion documents are added daily to Microsoft 365. Today, organizations spend $46 billion per year storing and managing content, and it is estimated that by 2025, there will be more than 130 billion terabytes of content. With SharePoint Premium’s content processing feature, you can automate your content-based processes—capturing the information in your business documents and transforming that information into working knowledge for your organization. Learn about the capabilities within content processing and actionable use cases you can implement to realize productivity gains.

Leveraging pre-trained models to quickly extract key metadata from contracts, invoices, and receipts is not the only thing you can do with SharePoint Premium Content Processing. You can also build your own custom models to process structured, unstructured, and freeform documents such as insurance forms, proposals, and quotes.

With Optical character recognition (OCR), you can extract handwritten or printed data from image files and make it available in the search index. Gone are the days when you had to use Google Translate to translate and understand documents written in foreign languages; with SharePoint Premium’s document translation service, you can translate documents and video transcripts as well.

Image and taxonomy tagging is another useful feature as it improves the searchability of content, helping organizations promote knowledge sharing and unlocking the true value of their information assets. Not to mention that SharePoint Premium extracts, analyzes, and categorizes your data, preparing your content for Microsoft Copilot, so you don’t have to do the work yourself, clicking and sorting through hundreds or thousands of files.

To help you understand the different ways you can use SharePoint Premium content processing, we’ll be using a scenario to guide you through the different capabilities. Imagine that you are a fund management company that regularly receives a variety of documents related to investments, regulatory filings, client communications, research reports, financial statements, and client agreements and contracts. Here are the ways you would leverage content processing:

The first step in content processing is the intake of all the documents. Employees such as fund managers, analysts, compliance officers, and administrative staff would upload the files to SharePoint document libraries.

After document ingestion is completed, say your data analyst team needs an efficient way to extract information from the monthly financial statements from various sources and formats and then supply this information to PowerBI to visualize trends. To tackle this, the team would utilize document classification and content extraction.

With SharePoint Premium’s unstructured data processing (aka teaching method), you can train the model to classify the documents based on their content and metadata attributes. This facilitates easy retrieval and organization. For instance, documents may be categorized as New Investment Opportunities, Due Diligence Reports, Market Research, Investment Committee Materials, or, in this case, Statement of Your Account.

If your team needs to extract key metadata from Client Agreement documents, which have standard format and layout, they can also use content extraction. From these documents, you may want to extract metadata like the Client’s Full Name, Agreement Date, Client’s Address, and Acknowledgment of Risk. By training SharePoint Premium’s Structured document processing (aka layout method) with just 5 sample documents, you can set the system up to automatically extract whenever new documents are added to the document library.

Compliance is critical in fund management, with regulations governing various aspects of investment activities. SharePoint Premium’s automatic tagging feature helps with compliance by automatically identifying and tagging documents containing sensitive or regulated information. Compliance officers can quickly identify the documents that are missing tags and address compliance issues, reducing the risk of non-compliance.

SharePoint eSignature simplifies the process of signing and sharing documents while providing security and compliance from Microsoft 365. Fund management companies often have to get clients to sign various agreements, disclosures, and account opening documents.

E-signatures enable clients to sign these documents electronically, eliminating the need for printing, scanning, and mailing physical copies. This accelerates the client onboarding process, reduces paperwork, and enhances the overall client experience. With SharePoint eSignature, you can quickly and securely send documents for signature to people both inside and outside of your organization. You also have a digital audit trail, which can be used to verify the authenticity of documents and transactions.

Overall, content processing empowers organizations to unlock the value of their content, enhance productivity, and gain actionable insights from their documents stored within SharePoint. You no longer have to manually extract data from documents or struggle to find the right forms with the powerful capabilities of SharePoint Premium.

Interested in learning more about SharePoint Premium? Check out our blog on SharePoint Premium’s content assembly to learn about practical use cases behind this tool that makes generating repetitive documents that much easier.

By: Deepa Moorjmalani and Noorez Khamis