Whether you’re processing purchase orders or expense statements, storing valuable product information, or preparing project documentation, chances are much of your content follows the “content lifecycle”. The content lifecycle is a series of necessary steps from creation and classification to whichever action is needed for your business process. And much of this lifecycle benefits from automation.
SharePoint Syntex, the latest addition to Microsoft content services, enhances the existing advanced features of SharePoint, helping you innovate and automate business processes. With the initial release of Syntex, we helped streamline early parts of the content lifecycle in classifying and extracting metadata and with our newest feature release – Content Assembly – the entire content lifecycle can be automated.
First, let’s look at the content lifecycle and how Syntex covers each step.
What is the content lifecycle?
The content lifecycle starts with creation – filling out a paper form, scanning and uploading printed documents, building a Word document or PowerPoint deck, or signing a PDF. Once you create new content, you need to store it somewhere, like SharePoint, and then classify the content so it is categorized and stored appropriately for future reference and use.
- With Syntex, you can do this by creating a classifier – a type of AI-powered model that you can use to automate identification and classification of content.
- Take London Stock Exchange, for example: using Syntex, analysts are able to quickly ingest Key Investor Information Documents and capture all of the information needed, significantly reducing the time spent processing documents.
In the classification process, metadata is identified and extracted from the document – information such as start and end dates, client names, and costs and more, depending on the document. With metadata, the content is easier to locate, retrieve, and organize.
- With Syntex, you can automatically pull specific information from your content by assigning extractors to each entity in the document.
- If you’re working with standard documents that follow a similar structure, you can also use form processing to create models within document libraries to identify and extract key-value pairs and table data. This is particularly helpful for documents such as invoices, purchase orders, receipts, and standardized forms.
With metadata properly applied, other people in your organization can search to find the content you’ve classified and labeled.
- With advanced metadata search, a new feature in Syntex, users can perform specific queries in SharePoint – where they can search on metadata values like dates, names, costs, and more, instead of just keywords.
Once the right people can quickly find and access the right content, they can decide and act – whether that’s a rejection or approval or another step in your business process.
What happens after that? The process doesn’t stop there – new content is created. It could be a payment for an invoice, or a new revision of a contract, and the cycle is repeated.
Now, content creation is easier with Content Assembly, our newest addition to Syntex.
Content Assembly – kicking the content lifecycle into high-gear
As you know, the content lifecycle doesn’t end when you classify documents. Frequently, that first piece of content kickstarts the creation of a whole slew of new documents – often built from content that’s used in the original document.
With Content Assembly, you can build that new contract, invoice, letter, or other document from existing data sources, or, by leveraging AI, you can turn your existing document into a template to be used for your business-specific needs.
Watch our Ignite session on Content Assembly to learn more about how this feature works.
How does this apply to me?
While the lifecycle makes logical sense, you may be wondering – “this is all great, but how does it apply to me?”.
Here are two examples of the content lifecycle and how content assembly can help drive and close the loop for a typical organization like Woodgrove Bank (a subsidiary of Contoso 😉!).
Loan processing at Woodgrove Bank:
- Woodgrove receives and processes a new loan application using Syntex.
- The Woodgrove lending department uses advanced metadata search to find the specific loan.
- Having found the loan, the lending team reviews and collaborates on the loan.
- Based on their review, the lending team approves or rejects the loan.
- Using Content Assembly in Syntex, the team generates the appropriate document (in this case an approval or rejection letter) which pulls in information from their application.
Using Syntex, the loan team can more quickly process the content given to them, and the customer receives a prompt response.
Customer service at Contoso
- The Contoso customer service department receives complaints and praise about the company and its products. They use Syntex to process the various pieces of content.
- Using advanced metadata search, the team easily finds a specific complaint that requires action.
- Next the team collaborates on the content in SharePoint and decides on next steps.
- Once the team decides, the action can be approved or rejected using Power Automate.
- With Content Assembly, the team quickly creates a letter to the customer, addressing their needs or simply saying thank you, by pulling the appropriate content such as the customer’s name and address from the original complaint or praise.
In both examples above, the teams using Syntex can use the power of AI within Syntex to quickly process the content, address the need, and maintain customer satisfaction.
With Syntex, users dealing with the never-ending content lifecycle can create more efficiency in their processes, increase accuracy in classification, improve search times and discovery, and in turn – improve productivity and customer experience.
Syntex customers are already doing this. You can learn more about how organizations like London Stock Exchange Group and Northumbrian Water are using Syntex today in our customer story library.
What next?
There’s a lot of great information out about Syntex, many of which are linked here in this blog post. If you’re interested in pursuing Syntex, we encourage customers to contact their Microsoft account team. Thanks.