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SharePoint Premium vs. PortalTalk

What is the added value of SharePoint Premium compared to PortalTalk?

Since November 2023, Microsoft has been offering SharePoint Premium. This is an additional license for SharePoint on top of the standard SharePoint Online license within the Microsoft 365 subscriptions. This briefing quickly provides insight into the extra features and applications of SharePoint Premium. Additionally, it compares overlapping or similar features of PortalTalk versus SharePoint Premium, including features that SharePoint Premium has and PortalTalk does not (yet).

What is SharePoint Premium?

SharePoint Premium is an advanced platform for managing content within Microsoft 365. It uses AI and automation to organize and secure documents. Additionally, it ensures that content is ready for use with Microsoft 365 Co-pilot, the AI assistant that helps increase productivity. Here are some specific features of SharePoint Premium:

  1. Intelligent document processing: The system uses AI to automatically sort and label documents.

  2. Strong security: There are tools to keep documents safe and managed.

  3. Better search function: You can search faster and more accurately thanks to AI.

  4. Electronic signatures: Support for e-signatures makes signing documents easier.

  5. Automatic form processing: The system can automatically process forms and better understand their content.

SharePoint Advanced Management compared to PortalTalk features

In comparison with PortalTalk, we mainly discuss point 2: strong security. This feature falls under the SharePoint Advanced Management functions, which is an integral part of SharePoint Premium.

What is SharePoint Advanced Management?

SharePoint Advanced Management is an add-on for Microsoft 365 that offers advanced tools for managing and securing SharePoint and OneDrive environments. It helps organizations manage content, improve security, and automatically clean up inactive sites. These functions are part of SharePoint Advanced Management:

  1. Content management: Helps prevent files from being scattered everywhere.

  2. Better security: Ensures that only the right people have access to certain files.

  3. Automatic cleanup: Automatically finds and manages unused SharePoint sites.

  4. Smart insights: Uses AI to find and solve problems.

  5. Access management: Helps secure sensitive data.

Features that overlap with PortalTalk

Site Life Cycle Management:

  • Create a report of inactive sites

  • Monthly email to site owners/site admins

  • Reporting inactive sites for more than 3 months

Data Access governance has reports for:

  • Shared documents

  • Documents with sensitivity labels

For both functions, the reports are not live but need to be generated, which can take several hours.

Features outside the scope of PortalTalk

Restrict access to shared documents:

  • Restrict access to sites, only for owners and members. Sharing documents outside of this does not work.

  • Prevent downloads of documents, both for internal and external users.

Customized document history:

  • Report provides insight into which Global Admins and SharePoint Admins have made changes to documents, mainly for auditing purposes.

Restrict access to OneDrives:

  • Link groups with members who only get access to a OneDrive. Members not in those groups do not have a OneDrive.

What is the overlap with PortalTalk?

Site Life Cycle management functions for SharePoint sites are also available in PortalTalk. The inactivity of a site, as well as a team workspace, can be found in various places. Firstly, in the workspace report as hard data. But also analyzed and shown in dashboards, including the Admin KPI dashboards and user KPI notifications. PortalTalk goes further in actually doing something with the inactivity data, whereas within SharePoint Advanced Management it is limited to providing reports.

Insight into shared documents is provided by SharePoint Advanced Management by generating reports with overviews of the shared documents. This is to have insight into the shared documents of the organization. This is only providing the overviews. No further actions are possible other than manually bringing this to the organization and encouraging users to do something with it.

PortalTalk also provides insight into the state of shared documents and links this directly to two actions:

  1. In the periodic access review, the owner is shown the list of shared documents. They can directly intervene to withdraw sharing and bring it back under the control of the workspace.

  2. The user KPI notification ‘Shared documents too high’ from the analysis functions in PortalTalk notifies users who exceed the KPI setting (default 175 documents). In this notification, users have the action to directly withdraw shared documents.

Finally, PortalTalk will have a function (release 2025) for administrators to have insight into the shared documents, particularly the analyzed insight with advice on actions to be taken. A long list of only shared documents is not very useful for an administrator.

What are the differences with PortalTalk?

The functions already mentioned as outside the scope for PortalTalk are clear:

  • Restrict access to shared documents

  • Customized document history

  • Restrict access to OneDrives

These unique functions of SharePoint Advanced Management have a different function within PortalTalk for some topics. Restricting access to shared documents is a direct action, while PortalTalk is more about placing access control with the owner of workspaces. Audit trail of documents and restricting access to OneDrive is not within the scope of the PortalTalk application, although involving OneDrive functions in PortalTalk is expected for the future (2025).

What are the costs of the licenses?

SharePoint Advanced Management is part of SharePoint Premium. SharePoint Premium costs €20.60 per user/month. SharePoint Advanced Management can also be purchased as a separate license and costs €3.00 per user/month. PortalTalk for Teams costs between €1.00 and €1.50 per user/month, depending on the number of users. The PortalTalk Premium Add-on costs between €0.30 and €0.45 per user/month. This is only purchased if SharePoint site categories are managed in PortalTalk or if extensive SharePoint provisioning is used.

Conclusion

SharePoint Advanced Management is a SharePoint administrator tool that provides extensive control to the administrator. A good addition to the standard management environment. PortalTalk approaches many of these functions from a different angle, not only providing insight or denying access but also linking insight to actions. Think of the Access Review and the User KPI notifications. PortalTalk also focuses not only on administrators but also on users, to notify them in a controlled manner and offer an action. The results are then offered to the PortalTalk administrators through expected improvements in the KPI dashboards. A different approach, therefore.

Finally, there is something to be said about the price. The €3.00 per user per month for SharePoint Advanced Management is already higher than the standard PortalTalk license price per user, even if the PortalTalk Premium Add-on is included. This comparison to the PortalTalk price makes SharePoint Advanced Management an expensive license, especially considering that the PortalTalk license includes many more features not described here.