SharePoint Premium benefits for internal communications

SharePoint Premium is “the evolution of Syntex” says Microsoft, and so this is the first clue that Premium is about managing documents, workflows, and metadata. So does SharePoint Premium provide benefits to internal communicators, intranet managers, and departmental intranet publishers?

What SharePoint Premium gives you 

Because Microsoft (like many of us) uses the word ‘content’, it’s hard to separate the functions that affect documents from those that affect intranet pages and news posts. 

Documents and files 

SharePoint Premium excels in document management, focusing on knowledge management and operations rather than employee intranet functions. With AI capabilities, it autofills SharePoint columns, flags files with personally identifiable information (PII), sets content types, and redacts sensitive data. 

Microsoft says, “… document processing, content assembly, optical character recognition, image processing and taxonomy tagging have all reached general availability under the Syntex brand, and going forward will be part of SharePoint Premium.” 

Document generation and smart management processes should interest legal, procurement, and knowledge management professionals, but may not directly benefit communicators. 

SharePoint Premium provides remarkable document processing services, including: 

• Business Documents app in Microsoft Teams for high-value documents like contracts 
• Document Portal for working with external partners (sheesh, it’s an extranet site) 
• SharePoint eSignature provides approval workflows and digital signatures 
• Data Access Governance reduces the risk of oversharing information, considering Microsoft Search and Copilot (AI). 

Content and comms (not particularly document files) 

Now to the features of SharePoint Premium that can directly enhance your intranet. 

Translation 

Automatically convert files and Stream video transcripts into different languages. 

Translation for Stream video in SharePoint (no details as yet). 

Stream video AI clean-up 

Automatically removes pauses in Stream video recordings. 

The best thing about SharePoint Premium for internal communications pros 

I absolutely believe that internal comms pros must care about video captions and transcripts, and often multiple languages, for the sake of accessibility and reaching / supporting everyone across the org. So while SharePoint Premium is mostly about document files, I can see it helping with multilingual intranets in two ways: 

1. Machine generation and translation of video transcripts (i.e. Stream videos). 

2. Machine translation of important (‘high-value’) comms via Word document. 

What do I mean by “via Word document”? Well, currently if you wish to publish a news article in two languages, SharePoint will help you manage two separate but related news pages (ask me how!). But SharePoint will not translate the text of your news post; you have to do the translating – usually by a (human) professional translation service that takes one or two days. 

But with SharePoint Premium, you could pop the Word document containing your text into a document library and then click to have the document translated (perhaps for less than a penny). Now you can copy the text from this newly generated document and use the text in your intranet news page. 

(If you’re a fan of the Immersive Reader feature of SharePoint and already know that it can do on-the-fly translation of pages for end users, note that Microsoft has disabled copying and pasting.) 

So that’s it, machine translation of Word documents can provide the text you need to build a multilingual intranet or multilingual home page for news without paying for human translation.  

Anything else? While Microsoft Copilot (AI) promises to help create more pleasant home pages and content pages, new background colours and rounded-corner ‘content cards’ are coming to SharePoint for everyone.

It’s a ‘no’ from me 

In my opinion, internal communicators and intranet managers should not lead the organisation to invest in SharePoint Premium. But they should benefit from the machine translation services if knowledge managers or contracts managers choose to adopt SharePoint Premium, or if they already have Microsoft Syntex. It’s then up to the business, IT, and your Global / SharePoint Administrator to work out how to spread the cost across active users. 

What SharePoint Premium costs 

SharePoint Premium is an evolution of Microsoft Syntex and SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) and is priced as a pay-as-you-go service. 

For example, smart document creation from a Syntex template costs 15¢. Document and transcript translation costs $15 for a million characters. 

As a PAYG service, SharePoint Premium can be used with any Microsoft licence that uses an Azure subscription. Your Global Administrator or SharePoint Administrator must configure the billing. 

The alternatives to SharePoint Premium 

As an evolution of Syntex and Advanced Management, SharePoint Premium is about document management, processing, generation, and security. 

Power Platform 

You may well already use Power Platform, Microsoft Graph, and perhaps even SharePoint Framework (“SPFx”). Larger organisations tend to have experts within IT and as business partners to make all these things work in the background. 

For smaller organisations, you might find a team member feels confident in using Power Platform to create custom workflows and even mini ‘apps’ that everyone can use. But when a team member, rather than IT, develops and rolls out a tactical solution, how will it be maintained for years? What happens when that expert team member leaves? 

Dedicated intranet software 

I think IC professionals can avoid thinking about Syntex and Premium and automated document processing¹ and focus on intranet sites and pages and the employee experience. If employees and IC pros find SharePoint sites and pages lacking (considering targeted news, etc.) then an intranet-in-a-box that transforms SharePoint into a more feature-rich intranet may be the solution. 

There are several different types of intranet; take a look at our reviews of leading intranet systems, some of which are standalone and some that require SharePoint.

SharePoint Premium info and essential resources 

Introducing SharePoint Premium – the launch blog article by Jeff Teper, President – Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms. 

SharePoint Premium Blog – new articles as they get published. 

SharePoint Premium translation – click to translate a Word (etc.) document. 

Microsoft Syntex – landing page. 

Adoption centre, SharePoint Premium – resources and guidance.

1. I do believe knowledge management is an important and integral part of the intranet, and excellent KM can be achieved with SharePoint so long as there are expert people leading the strategy and tactics. ↩︎