Assess your organization's content management status

SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) provides a comprehensive set of tools for assessing and improving your organization's content management practices with actionable insights and recommendations. Content Management Assessment is the hub for these capabilities.

What is Content Management Assessment?

Content Management Assessment is a built-in, easy-to-use feature of SharePoint Advanced Management. With just one click, you can quickly check and improve how your organization manages content within SharePoint environments. Content Management Assessment provides a simple, guided process for administrators to:

• Identify potentially overshared content
• Find issues or risks (such as inactive or ownerless sites)
• Define Copilot readiness for the organization
• Ensure compliance and maintain data integrity
• Receive actionable recommendations for remediation
• Track progress over time with recurring assessments

The assessment uses the SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) toolkit, running a suite of essential reports to surface key findings and categorize sites that might require attention. It makes content governance accessible and actionable, even for admins who might not have deep technical expertise.

Included reports

Currently, the Content Management Assessment includes the following reports:

• Inactive sites report: Identifies sites with no activity in the past 180 days.
• Site ownership report: Detects sites without owners or with only one owner.
• Broken inheritance report: Finds sites where permission inheritance is broken.
• Unrestricted internal sharing via EEEU (Everyone Except External Users) report: Locates content shared with all internal users.
• Unrestricted sharing via sharing links: Discovers content shared through overly permissive sharing links.

Why use Content Management Assessment?

Organizations face increasing complexity in managing content across large Microsoft 365 tenants. Common challenges include:

• Uncertainty about where to start with governance.
• Difficulty identifying whether there are actual problems or risks.
• Lack of clarity on whether existing governance measures are sufficient.
• The need for ongoing monitoring and improvement.

Content Management Assessment addresses these challenges by:

• Automating discovery: Automatically discover and categorize potentially impacted sites without manual intervention.
• Clear, actionable findings: Provide a clear list of issues with specific recommended next steps for each finding.
• Eliminating manual work: Reduce the need for custom scripts or manual audits, which can be time-consuming and error-prone.
• On-demand reassessment: Allow administrators to rerun the assessment monthly to ensure continuous improvement and compliance.

What do you need to access Content Management Assessment?

License requirements

Your organization needs to have the right licenses and meet certain administrative permissions or roles to use the feature described in this article.

First, your organization must have one of the following base licenses:

• Office 365 E3, E5, or A5
• Microsoft 365 E1, E3, E5, or A5

Additionally, you need at least one of these licenses:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot license: At least one user in your organization must be assigned a Copilot license (this user doesn't need to be a SharePoint administrator).
• Microsoft SharePoint Advanced Management license: Available as a standalone purchase.

Administrator requirements

You must be a SharePoint administrator or have equivalent permissions.

Additional information

If your organization has a Copilot license and at least one person in your organization is assigned a Copilot license, SharePoint administrators automatically gain access to the SharePoint Advanced Management features needed for Copilot deployment.

For organizations without a Copilot license, you can use SharePoint Advanced Management features by purchasing a standalone SharePoint Advanced Management license.

Where to find Content Management Assessment

You can access Content Management Assessment in the SharePoint Admin Center:

1. Sign in to the SharePoint admin center.

2. In the navigation pane, select Advanced Management.

3. Look for the new assessment starting screen, as shown in the following image:

   

   (Previously, the menu-based view was available under All Features).

4. Select Start assessment.

The assessment automatically runs the relevant SAM reports, analyzes the results, and presents findings in a user-friendly dashboard, which includes:

• Visual summary of impacted sites
• Report findings, which list impacted sites, specific findings, and recommended actions for remediation. You can select each of the findings to see more details and related Microsoft Learn documentation to address the issue.
• The latest guidelines and documentation related to these policies.

Next steps after running the assessment

1. Review findings: Examine the list of sites flagged as potentially impacted. The dashboard shows both the number and details of these sites.

2. Take action: For each finding, follow the recommended steps provided. These steps might include:

   • Creating or adjusting site policies, such as for potential oversharing, inactivity, or ownership.
   • Using built-in tools to fix problems.
   • Consulting linked documentation for further guidance.

3. Monitor progress: Rerun the assessment every 30 days to track improvements and catch new problems.