Microsoft Ignite 2020 is over and even in its virtual form, it has left Microsoft customers with many new announcements to digest. We will analyze these announcements in a future post, but one announcement that requires immediate consideration is the launch of SharePoint Syntex. You may remember that at Ignite 2019, Microsoft announced Project Cortex, which was designed to:

“Use AI to automatically classify content into topics to form a knowledge network. The goal was to improve individual productivity and organizational intelligence, helping identify experts on specific topics, and surfacing knowledge through interactive experiences across Microsoft 365, such as in the Office apps, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams.

It's one year later and where are we? While the grand promise of Cortex remains, Microsoft released a first iteration called SharePoint Syntex. According to Microsoft, “SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge.” How does it do it? Automatic classification of content using SharePoint metadata.

SharePoint Metadata to the Rescue

Yes, metadata is the key to information classification in Syntex, as it has been for SharePoint in the past. As per the announcement, “metadata is critical to managing content, and seamless integration with Microsoft Search… enabling you to improve knowledge discovery.” So what’s new? For one, with Syntex, Microsoft has added a machine learning model. According to the announcement: “your experts train SharePoint Syntex to understand content like they do, to recognize key information, and to tag content automatically using SharePoint metadata….”

In other words, Syntex, with the help of your knowledge experts, will automatically tag content with SharePoint metadata.

With Microsoft doubling down on metadata to help workers find content fast, now is the time to view the harmon.ie webinar Five Strategies for Finding Information in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. In addition to demonstrating how harmon.ie's newly-released advanced search capabilities using metadata can help you find information quickly, the webinar covers additional key ways to find centrally stored emails and documents. Demoed in the webinar are a host of navigation tools, as well as sort, filter, views, and more. These features are powerful today and they will become even more powerful as organizations begin to deploy Syntex.