TL;DR: SharePoint Embedded is a new Azure service that lets you easily deliver Microsoft 365 Copilot, Collaboration, Compliance, and Core enterprise storage as part of any file and document centric Azure app you want to build.
Azure developers have several great storage options to choose from depending on their use case, and today I’m excited to introduce a new one: SharePoint Embedded. SPE is an Azure service that brings the best of Azure and Microsoft 365 capabilities together so developers building file and document intensive apps, including AI focused apps, can more easily and completely meet the complex needs of their global enterprise customers.
Learn more: Join the SharePoint Embedded December Super Session: New Collaborative, Copilot-Ready Storage for Azure Developers
Enterprise customers around the world rely on Microsoft 365 to power the 4Cs – Copilot, Collaboration, Compliance, and Core enterprise storage – for their most mission-critical files and documents. SharePoint Embedded lets you, the Azure app developer, deliver these same 4Cs as part of your apps. This is true for both ISV apps and enterprise line of business apps.
Learn more: Try SharePoint Embedded for Free with this tutorial.
Let’s first explore how SharePoint Embedded delivers these capabilities as part of Microsoft 365, and then we’ll explore how SharePoint Embedded connects with Azure.
SharePoint Embedded 101
The key innovation that allows Microsoft to deliver SharePoint Embedded is a novel use of partitioning within an M365 tenant. Already today, there are partitions in the M365 storage system dedicated to OneDrive and SharePoint Online. These partitions keep the information logically isolated and allow the owning apps to deliver a custom user experience. SharePoint Embedded gives you, the developer, the ability to create your own custom partition in the M365 storage layer. Just like the other partitions, your custom partition includes all of the Copilot, Collaboration, Compliance, and Core-storage capabilities your M365 tenant has configured.
SharePoint Embedded is different than SharePoint Online in several important ways, all of which have been carefully designed to deliver a delightful and highly performant developer and user experience. First and foremost, SPE is a fully headless service. There is no user experience layer. You, the developer, create whatever user experience makes sense for your app. Second, SPE focuses on file and document management, and does not include features like lists or intranet creation and management. Third, and this is critical, SPE, as an isolated partition, also has an isolated resource usage allocation stack that is twice as large as the highest shared M365 resource allocation. When it comes to resource usage, it doesn’t share its entitlements with any other service. You of course still need to manage retry after responses, just as with any service, but SPE is specifically designed to have high limits that make it easy for developers of even the most demanding apps to succeed.
SharePoint Embedded is a headless, developer focused, file and document management super service. Files stored are accessible by Copilot; are easy to Collaborate on with Microsoft Office apps, web and desktop, with just a single click; are fully integrated with M365’s Compliance offerings such as Purview with global audit, eDiscovery, data loss prevention, and a whole lot more; and are backed by Core enterprise storage with M365 business continuity promises, all right out of the box.
You should know that Microsoft is building our newest apps on this exactly same stack. These include apps like Loop, Designers, Copilot Pages, and many more.
Azure Developers Rejoice
SharePoint Embedded is an Azure service and is managed through a combination of the Azure Portal and SharePoint PowerShell scripts.
First, let’s talk about metering. SharePoint Embedded is a metered service, with meters tracking storage, transactions , and egress. All interaction is done via the Microsoft Graph API, and you are only charged for transactions you initiate. Transactions with the Office APIs for collaboration, for example, are not charged.
Next, let’s talk about the Azure components that come together to create a SharePoint Embedded app. First and foremost is Entra. In Entra, you create the enterprise app definition and give it various API permissions. You connect that app definition, along with an Azure subscription, resource group, and data center, to a customer’s M365 environment with a new construct called a SharePoint Embedded container type, working with a PowerShell script.
Finally, as you would expect, all detailed billing records surface via the Azure Portal, ensuring that it’s easy for admins to track specific expenses by customer, app, department or whatever other division is important. Of course, when it’s connected to these Azure capabilities, it’s also connected to Azure’s robust IAM framework
Learn more: Join the SharePoint Embedded December Super Session: New Collaborative, Copilot-Ready Storage for Azure Developers
Getting Started is Easy
Getting started with SharePoint Embedded is easy and self-service. A typical Microsoft 365 Developer Program account, or a regular production account, both of which are connected to Azure by default, gives you everything you need. Additionally, the SharePoint Embedded VS Code Plugin lets you try the basics of SharePoint Embedded for free in just a few minutes.
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