Blog Post

Document Processing Blog
3 MIN READ

January 2022 – Syntex Licensing Updates and New Year Reflections

Chris McNulty's avatar
Chris McNulty
Former Employee
Jan 14, 2022

Happy New Year!   As we move into 2022, the Syntex team wanted to spotlight upcoming Syntex updates and reflect on our innovations delivered in 2021.

 

Licensing Update

As we announced at Ignite, we are making changes to how Syntex is licensed. Starting today, every Microsoft 365 user will be able to build models to classify documents and extract metadata, access content centers and work with processed documents and their metadata. Until now, a Syntex seat license was required to work with any document or metadata that had been processed by Syntex. A Syntex seat license is still required for the processing of documents (including uploading content to be processed), and still required to use other Syntex features like advanced metadata search, document generation, image tagging, vertical solutions like contracts, and more.

 

Coming in January

We have many exciting features releasing soon. Here are a few to note:

  • Content assembly: With content assembly, you can build new content from your existing data sources or turn existing documents into templates to generate new content like contracts, invoices, or statements of work. Public roadmap item 88717.
  • Contract management: With contract management you can govern contract creation, analysis, and lifecycles with standard clause libraries, workflow driven approvals, and automatic classification. Public roadmap item 88713.
  • Visualization services: Automatically build visualizations of library metadata with Power BI and share them with other users. Public roadmap item 88706.
  • Language support: Run form processing models against structured documents in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

To read through all of our features releasing soon, read our Ignite blog.

 

2021 Recap

In our first full year, we expanded Syntex in many ways.  Let’s look at some:

At launch in 2020, Syntex capabilities were centered on enabling you to capture knowledge with no-code models that could understand content the way you do – recognizing key information and tagging it automatically. These models automatically capture, ingest, and categorize your content. To do this, SharePoint Syntex launched with the following capabilities:

  • Document understanding: A core capability of SharePoint Syntex, document understanding uses machine teaching to automatically suggest or create metadata from unstructured documents.
  • Form processing: Based on AI Builder, this key capability lets you automatically recognize and extract common values (such as dates, names, and addresses) from semi-structured or structured documents.

And as you began using this technology, use cases for Syntex stretched and we expanded with many new features to help you achieve more with your content.

 

Released in April – May 2021

  • Sensitivity labels: Classify and protect your organization’s data, while making sure that productivity isn’t hindered by automatically applying retention labels and MIP labels. Public Roadmap ID 81975.
  • Regular expressions: Provide more powerful explanations when training a model with regular expression explanation types. Public Roadmap ID 81976.
  • Developer support: One of our most sought-after features – earlier this year, we were happy to share several resources to support developers. Check out our April blog for a full list.

June – August 2021

  • Content Center site template: To give you the time to train and evaluate a model’s effectiveness on your own content, we enabled content center site templates for all licensed Microsoft 365 users – note that this allows users to build and test models but does not allow users to publish models for live usage. Public Roadmap ID 82080.
  • Form processing – collections: With collections you can compose several models into one. With a collection name in the library where a model is applied, you can distinguish different file layouts processed by the same model. Public roadmap ID 82064.

 

These are just a few of the highlights from last year that enhanced the capabilities of SharePoint Syntex. Thanks.

 

Updated Jan 14, 2022
Version 1.0

5 Comments

  • GSom1221's avatar
    GSom1221
    Copper Contributor

    Chris McNulty "yes - running models requires a license - whether or not you trigger it my u0loading or clicking the "classify and extract" button.  However, now any M365/O365 user can then access the doc and metadata without a Syntex license. " 

     

    Scenario : Person X is a syntex licensed user who created a model in a document library . Person Y and Z are normal users without syntex license , but just has contribute access to the document library. 

    Y and Z uploads documents . Model will be automatically triggered/run on every document upload,  (irrespective of the uploader user's license) and the users will be able to see extracted metadata even though they dont have syntex license . 

     

    Above is how syntex  was working for last 4 months . Is there any changes to this ? I am confused with the above explanation.

  • Jim Duncan's avatar
    Jim Duncan
    Brass Contributor

    Chris McNulty Ok, got it: Not quite as big of a boon as I originally thought, but still quite impressive and generous.

    THANKS!

  • danlucarini's avatar
    danlucarini
    Copper Contributor

    Chris, we also liked the new Invoice data capture model introduced at Ignite. See our review here:

    https://www.deep-analysis.net/report/invoice-processing/ 

  • Jim Duncan yes - running models requires a license - whether or not you trigger it my u0loading or clicking the "classify and extract" button.  However, now any M365/O365 user can then access the doc and metadata without a Syntex license.

  • Jim Duncan's avatar
    Jim Duncan
    Brass Contributor

    Chris McNulty 

    A Syntex seat license is still required for the processing of documents (including uploading content to be processed).

    Does this mean that every user adding documents to a Library that has a Syntex Model applied will still need a Syntex Seat license?