SharePoint Advanced Management

SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) is a paid add-on for Microsoft 365 that ships extra governance, security, and lifecycle features on top of SharePoint Online. It's become especially important since Microsoft 365 Copilot launched — many of SAM's features are also bundled into Copilot prerequisites.

What's in SAM

The major capabilities, grouped:

Oversharing visibility

• Data access governance (DAG) reports for sites with too many people, "Everyone except external" usage, or sensitivity-label drift.
• Site lifecycle reports — inactive sites, sites with too many owners or none.
• Permissions reports scoped to a site, library, or item.

Sharing controls

• Restricted access controls at the site level — only specific Entra ID groups can access a given site, overriding sharing links.
• Block download policies — preview-only access from the browser, no local copies.
• Default sharing link types at site granularity.
• Site-level conditional access that ties into Intune compliance.

Lifecycle

• Inactive site policies — auto-flag, remind owners, and archive sites that haven't been touched in N days.
• Site archive — move a site to a low-cost archive state, recoverable, while removing it from active search and Copilot grounding.

Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness

SAM provides the inputs to two important Copilot-related reports: which sites are oversharing, and which should be excluded from Copilot grounding. Restricted access controls and archive policies are the two main levers.

Licensing

SAM is sold per user per month, with availability via a standalone SKU and as part of higher-tier plans and Copilot bundles. Tenants on E5 or Microsoft 365 Copilot increasingly find it included or heavily discounted.

Where SAM fits in your governance stack

SAM lives alongside:

• Microsoft Purview for retention, sensitivity labels, DLP, and eDiscovery.
• Entra ID Identity Governance for access reviews and entitlement management of the groups behind site permissions.
• Microsoft 365 admin center for the base lifecycle of groups and licences.

None of these replaces the others. SAM specifically handles SharePoint-level controls that the broader Purview and Entra tools can't see in granular detail.

For any organisation rolling out Copilot, SAM is no longer optional. It's the difference between an informed rollout and surprise oversharing.