Session: SharePoint: Transform Your Content Experiences in the Era of AI
Speakers: Sesha Mani, Mohit Chand, Vijay Sharma
SharePoint is a powerful content platform that enables you to collaborate, communicate, and control your content with dynamic sites, secure file sharing, and integrated content management. In this blog post, we will summarize the key takeaways from the Microsoft 365 Community Conference session on SharePoint content solutions which focused on the new Agreements solution, presented by Sesha Mani, Mohit Chand, and Vijay Sharma from Microsoft.
Introduction to SharePoint Premium Content Services
The session was kicked off by Sesha Mani who did an introduction to the importance of SharePoint, it’s role in the Microsoft 365 Digital Workplace, and of course covered the advanced content services in SharePoint Premium!
SharePoint Premium is a family of advanced content experiences and management capabilities to maximize the value of your content in the cloud and help get it ready for Copilot. It includes metered pay-as-you-go services, such as content processing, e-signature, OCR, and translation!
The New Agreements Solution
We then started focusing on the star of the session – the new Agreements solution which was covered by Vijay Sharma.
This new solution is designed to help you create, manage, and sign agreements faster and smarter. Agreements are the foundation of business transactions, and they are high-value documents that are associated with monetary value, legally binding, and kept as records. However, the current process of creating and finalizing agreements is often challenging, time-consuming, error-prone, and inconsistent. Not to mention the sheer number of agreements created per year in last organizations! I am sure some of you probably expected this number – but I was very surprised!
The agreements solution aims to solve these challenges by providing an end-to-end solution for agreements infused with AI. The solution consists of five steps:
- Define templates - Build once, use forever. You can create templates in Word, insert custom fields and snippets from a library, configure reviewers and approvers, and publish templates for reuse.
- Generate agreements with self-service creation. You can create agreements from your templates, edit and send them for review and approval. You can also track the status and history of each agreement.
- Review and negotiate which results in faster closing. You can use AI-driven deviation analysis to compare agreements with templates and flag any changes or risks. You can also collaborate with internal and external parties, suggest, and accept changes, and resolve issues.
- Sign and store with native e-signature. You can send e-signature requests from Word or Teams, sign agreements with Microsoft eSignature or third-party providers, and store signed agreements in SharePoint.
- Report and analyze which enables you to unlock insights. You can access reports and dashboards to monitor the performance and compliance of your agreements and use AI to extract metadata and insights from your agreements.
In the session we have seen amazing demos of each one of those pillars – and how all of them work in action! As this feature is still in preview, the demos were video based, and not actual demos – but that is usually to be expected in big live events like this, especially for a preview feature!
The Solution @ Microsoft Digital
The last part of the session was focused on how Microsoft has been using this solution internally for quite a while now – and some of the early success they had! The last part was covered by Mohit Chand.
As you can expect, Microsoft has a lot of legal documents, whether it’s contracts with Vendors, companies, or NDAs with MVPs! Microsoft has over 1.5M contracts in its repository a growth of 10% Year over Year and over 10,000 clauses across templates!
Microsoft Digital has started using the new Agreements solution and has digitized over 15% of their contracts with this solution! Microsoft Digital was able to go from a 3 to 5-month time to digitize a type of contract to only 14 days with the new Agreements solution, which is an amazing increase in productivity! During the presentation, a type of contract has an average of 3-6 templates, which is one of the reasons it was so long to digitize them before, but with the new templating functionality it's now a lot faster!
Summary and next steps
The agreements solution is one of the SharePoint content solutions that can help you put your content to work and transform your content experiences in the era of AI. The agreements solution can help you create, manage, and sign agreements faster and smarter, with less errors, consistent language, and centralized storage. You can also unlock insights and value from your agreements with AI and reports.
If you are interested in trying out the Agreements solution, you can sign up for the preview at https://aka.ms/AgreementsPreview
About the author
Vlad Catrinescu is a Microsoft MVP from Montreal, Canada who works as a Technical Evangelist at Syskit. You can find more content from Vlad Catrinescu on his YouTube Channel @VladTalksTech or watch one of his 80+ Pluralsight courses for more educational content! For more blogs make sure to check out his blog at https://vladtalkstech.com/