For the last three decades of my life, I’ve worked with organisations who “collect” content. People create documents, applications export data as CSV files, we take photos, we scan old content as part of a digitisation initiative and so on. Every organisation does it, some better than others, but they all have challenges as time passes.

As we create more stuff, we start having the issues finding things. People work in an unstructured way, we don’t train them, they don’t have access to the right place, so they create a new document and store it somewhere convenient. It’s an age-old story, that everyone has experienced.

There have been many solutions created to solve this problem. Document Management Systems, collaboration platforms, enterprise search, better file servers. The marketing material promised it would be easier to find things but forgot to tell you how much effort it might be and how everyone would need to work ‘the right way’ for this to work successfully. Let’s move to SharePoint!

That’s not a bad idea, but how do we do it? Often a decision is made to do this the quick way by lifting and shifting our content and keeping the same structure. But what did we move? I’m not just talking about the documents, but what they contain. You see the problem here is the content is now more discoverable and that can unlock hidden treasures that were locked away on the old file server. Next minute, you’re having a conversation about someone seeing a document that was meant to stay confidential, or much worse!

AI solutions like Copilot and others, are great because they make it very easy to find content that sometimes even the most capable SharePoint Search Artist (I might trademark that) can’t locate quickly. That is one of the features of Copilot I use the most. It’s fantastic!

How do you avoid having one of those moments? Here are some things to help you:

• Purview Sensitive Information Types
• SharePoint Advanced Management
• Restrict access
• Disposal of old content
• You (yes that’s right)

Purview Sensitive Information Types

Purview Sensitive Information Types feature requires M365 E5 or a plan with the Compliance addon. It lets you scan all the content in you SharePoint environment and identify where sensitive content might be located. You can use both built in filters or create your own custom ones. It’s powerful and works at scale across millions of documents.

SharePoint Advanced Management

SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) is included with Copilot and gives you the ability to report on permissions and identify potential oversharing. This is much more efficient that having someone manually check permissions which can be a difficult and time-consuming task.

Restrict access

Microsoft 365 has a variety of features to control access to content. Start with deciding who should or shouldn’t have access to each area of content. Use permissions to control access and align the sharing policies with the permissions. If the site doesn’t need external collaboration, then turn it off. You can also implement Restricted Access Control to limit access to specific content and Restricted Content Discovery to control Copilot access to content.

Dispose of old content

If you have content that isn’t needed anymore, then either archive it or dispose of it in a place where Copilot cannot see it. You can use Retention Policies or have manual processes, the main thing here is to do it. Having a good end of life process for your content is also a requirement for compliance in many organisations. Don’t hold on to content that contains personal or confidential information if you don’t need it. Bonus, you might reduce your long-term storage costs.

You (yes you)

It is a good idea to assume that Copilot will find something it shouldn’t or might reference the wrong content. Train yourself to check the output and the references Copilot uses. Don’t accept the content it generates will be correct, if you do then you might be in for an unwelcome surprise in the future. AI tools by nature are not 100% accurate, just like humans, AI gets things wrong but can sound convincing none the less.

There is no silver bullet to this problem, but there are things we can do to make our content fit for use. Don’t implement a one and done solution, implement a plan for ongoing Information Management and a Governance Group to oversee and make decisions with the organisations interests at heart.

Finally, don’t forget to communicate with your end users. If they don’t understand the why, then it is unreasonable to expect them to understand why they need to work in a particular way.