Unlocking SharePoint Advanced Management for Better Governance

What Is SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM)?

SharePoint Advanced Management is a comprehensive governance solution for SharePoint and OneDrive. With SAM, SharePoint Admins can keep control in your digital workspace and set up a secure spot for Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Why Need SAM?

Copilot works with internal data that users have access to, that means years of legacy content in SharePoint and OneDrive. Without solid governance, governance, organizations risk leaking sensitive files, mistakenly using outdated documents, or unauthorized sharing.

So organizations need to implement security or governance controls across their SharePoint content. Microsoft offers Purview Information Protection, a powerful tool for classifying and protecting data, often used to resolve this problem. But getting started with Purview, Entra ID, or Defender can feel overwhelming because it requires time, resources, and careful configuration to implement correctly.

This is where SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) comes into play. As a focused part of SharePoint Premium, SAM provides SharePoint admins with targeted controls to see what is being shared, tighten access, and keep stale content out of day-to-day decisions.

SAM helps organizations to implement security or governance across SharePoint content without the need to include complicated and demanding solutions like Entra ID, Purview, or Defender. With SAM, organizations can quickly:

• Make ownership clear for every site and file.

• Find and retire inactive or duplicate content to keep work current.

• Show and restrict access, including blocking downloads, to reduce accidental exposure.

SharePoint Advanced Management Key Features

Change history reports

With SAM, you get an exportable record of who changed what in settings for individual sites and the whole organization over the last 180 days, straight from the SharePoint admin center. You can create up to 10 custom reports, filter by sites and users, and download CSVs to review changes. This is ideal for incident review and for weekly governance packs.

Licensing requirement: base Microsoft 365/Office 365 (E1/E3/E5/A5) plus either a Copilot license in the tenant or the standalone SharePoint Advanced Management license.

Recent SharePoint admin actions

Without a SAM license, the history resets when you sign out. With SAM, your recent actions persist for 30 days, you will see items like site rename, deletion, and storage quota updates, and you can export the list to CSV. It only tracks your actions, not other admins, and it does not include organization-level changes.

Keep this panel open while you edit a site so you have a real-time log of the changes you are making. If you do a batch of updates, export the list to CSV afterward. That gives you a simple audit trail you can review, share with another admin, and use to pinpoint exactly what you would need to revert if something looks wrong

Licensing follows the same pattern as other SAM features: base M365, plus either at least one Copilot license in the tenant or the standalone SAM license.

Data Access Governance (DAG) reports

Data Access Governance reports help admins spot potential oversharing and locate SharePoint sites that hold sensitive content. They give you a quick assessment of sites from both a sharing and sensitivity angle so you can apply the right security or data protection controls.

A few DAG Report types:

• Sharing Links Report: Lists sites using Anyone, People in the organization, or Specific people links to highlight broad or external sharing.

• Sensitivity Labels Applied to Files Report: Finds sites that store files with specified sensitivity labels. Scope is limited to Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDFs, and only labels configured with File scope are included.

• Shared with “Everyone except external users” segment: Shows sites that grant access to the built-in group “Everyone except external users.” You can filter by site template, privacy setting, sensitivity label, and whether access is at the site or item level, which helps uncover hard-to-find item-level exposure.

Site lifecycle management

This policy lets admins define inactivity rules in the SharePoint admin center, automatically identify low-activity sites, and email owners to confirm whether a site is still needed. Owners certify a site as active via the “Certify site” action; once certified, the policy pauses checks on that site for one year.

Owners are emailed monthly for three months, no emails are sent for the next three months, and then monthly notifications resume if the site remains inactive. Admins can download an execution report to see which sites were certified or still need action.

Licensing requirement: The feature is licensed with Microsoft SharePoint Premium – SharePoint Advanced Management.

Default sensitivity labels for document libraries

Set a default label on a SharePoint library to automatically apply it to new files created or uploaded there, unless the file already has a label or a higher one. This is a location-based control because the label is tied to the library, not the user or app. It is simple and effective because you get baseline protection for new content without building content-inspection rules.

Licensing requirement: Microsoft has moved this capability to Microsoft 365 E5/A5/G5 (or equivalent security and compliance plans). It still appears alongside SAM options in the admin center, but entitlement now aligns with E5 family licenses.

SharePoint Advanced Management Limitations

We talked about what SAM is best at, let's dive into what it can't do. Let's break down the downsides in plain English to help you see the full picture.

Limited owner self-service

SAM is built for central administrators, not for site owners. Owners cannot run their own Data Access Governance (DAG) reports or kick off remediations directly from those reports. This design centralizes control but also concentrates workload and slows response unless you plan clear handoffs.

Set clear roles and a simple request path so admins can send fixes to the right people. When possible, use DAG to ask site owners to review and clean up permissions themselves. Some of these actions need SAM licenses and may not be available in certain government clouds.

Reporting scope and scale constraints

DAG activity views cover roughly the last 28–30 days; each report can run only once every 24 hours, and most reports do not include OneDrive. In the admin center, result lists are often capped around 100 sites, which is useful for a quick scan but not enough for large tenants.

To handle large tenants, switch to CSV exports for complete results and easier batching. The Sharing Links export can include up to 10,000 sites, and the “Everyone except external users” export scales up to 1,000,000 sites. Combine snapshot and activity reports to balance point-in-time exposure with recent changes, then script follow-ups where needed.

Short audit history & limited built-in remediation

Change History is a very nice feature in SAM, however, it’s based on the Microsoft Unified Audit Log, which only holds data for 180 days. You’ll mostly use this page to review changes from the last few days, but that makes its limits worth noting. Also, Your Recent Actions only retain 30 days of data.

Site-scoped controls and client/app caveats

Many SAM controls work per site, not tenant-wide. For example, site-specific Conditional Access can’t be applied to the root site. Block Download is also browser-focused: it doesn’t stop screenshots, doesn’t cover desktop Office editing in that mode, files already synced stay on devices, and some apps may still print. Use these controls on the most sensitive sites and pair them with labels, DLP, and device policies for stronger protection.

How Do We Approach This?

Although SAM might seem complex initially, it requires only basic setup that can be completed in an afternoon. The main challenge is looping in your team - sharing details on the upcoming changes, how they'll impact daily workflows, and the specific duties they'll handle for site audits.

Eager to implement SAM effectively? We offer a free meeting for guidance and tailored support, contact our experts to try now.