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I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Microsoft Regional Director, Joel Oleson, a respected voice in the Microsoft 365, the first SharePoint Admin ever, and a community warrior traveling the world, to discuss a recurring tension point in the enterprise world: the management of unstructured data.

Microsoft offers some of the most powerful document management platforms on the planet—SharePoint and OneDrive—but according to Joel, these tools are often flexible document management systems rather than “finished solutions” that modern enterprises, especially those in highly regulated sectors, require.

Our conversation revealed a strategic chasm: Microsoft is focused on providing sophisticated ‘building blocks,’ or ‘Legos,’ and expects its partners and customers to assemble the final, compliant solutions. While this provides flexibility, it introduces complexity and confusion, leaving a significant gap that partners are now struggling to fill. Here is an interview-style blog post synthesizing our discussion on the state of unstructured content management within the Microsoft ecosystem.

An Interview with Joel Oleson: The Content Services Paradox

You make a sharp distinction between SharePoint being a “flexible tool” and a “finished solution.” Why is this distinction so crucial for modern businesses?

It comes down to business outcomes, especially for highly regulated industries like legal, finance, and government. These companies can’t just buy a flexible platform; they need a structured, repeatable, out-of-the-box answer. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) also expect ready-to-use products, not a set of components they must piece together and maintain.

This aligns with the broader industry shift. Back in 2017, Gartner declared Enterprise Content Management (ECM) to be “dead” and replaced it with the concept of Content Services. That marked a move away from the idea of a single, monolithic, one-size-fits-all system to a collection of flexible services and microservices that can be integrated across multiple repositories. Microsoft is fully leaning into that new model. Still, the consequence is that they are providing the Content Services—the building blocks—and relying on partners and systems integrators to configure and complete the end-user solutions.

One of the most common complaints is the sheer complexity of configuration and licensing, which you described as a “mess.” Can you elaborate on the pain points?

The configuration experience for advanced information management—assuming the data is stored in SharePoint—is currently very fragmented. Customers must jump between multiple administrative interfaces, including the SharePoint Admin Center, Microsoft Admin Center (MAC), Microsoft Purview, and others, to configure the necessary governance and compliance settings.

The funny part of the story is that, for some SharePoint AI scenarios, you even have to configure Azure to enable AI experiences in a basic SharePoint library, adding unnecessary steps and complexity to a process that should be simple.

The shift to a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) model creates confusion—especially for premium capabilities like SharePoint AI. Customers want predictable, transparent licensing, but the current model introduces uncertainty and becomes a significant adoption barrier.

Microsoft often markets these tools to IT teams. Yet, IT teams frequently struggle to translate broad platform capabilities into the specific, structured, and regulated needs of departments such as Legal and Finance. The good news is that, at Ignite, Microsoft announced that Knowledge Agent will move to Copilot’s seat-based licensing model—an essential step toward simplifying the experience.

Microsoft is now investing heavily in AI. How does Autofill functionality for unstructured content address these needs?

The new autofill feature that leverages AI to extract and save data in SharePoint is, frankly, a massive step forward. It is a powerful tool and the start of a fantastic transformation.

However, right now, it’s just a feature—not a complete, repeatable solution. For AI to truly solve the problem, two things must happen:

1. Repeatability: Current SharePoint templates and site designs do not capture all the necessary configurations needed for information management, making it hard for customers or partners to reuse the same, governed solution across multiple clients. We need a way to reuse prompts and columns without manually recreating the same configurations again.
2. Integration (Work IQ): The AI needs to be extended beyond a single SharePoint library and integrated across the entire M365 suite using new intelligence layers, like Work IQ or Business IQ. For example, suppose a user receives an invoice in Teams. In that case, Work IQ should recognize the document type and proactively suggest automation: “I see this is an invoice. I can extract the metadata and notify the accounts payable team. Do you want me to do that?”.
3. The solution needs to be intelligent, automated, and actionable.

This strategy of providing building blocks has consequences for the Microsoft partner ecosystem. How are traditional partners adapting to this new reality?

The partner model is shifting radically. Microsoft is actively moving away from the traditional Independent Software Vendor (ISV) model, in which partners build large, monolithic, structured applications on SharePoint.

They are steering development toward low-code tools like App Builder and the Power Platform. The platform is changing so frequently that building and maintaining those old, large, compliance-focused apps on SharePoint has become incredibly difficult and, frankly, less viable. The message is clear: the future lies in rapid development with Power Platform services, but this leaves traditional partners struggling to pivot and maintain the structured, compliant solutions that regulated enterprises still demand.

what is the ultimate vision for content management at Microsoft?

The long-term vision is to move past the term “document” and focus on “data and files”. It’s about leveraging new layers of intelligence—Work IQ, Business IQ, and Fabric IQ—to extract the structure and insights from what has traditionally been considered unstructured content.

Microsoft is delivering the foundational technology for an intelligent content future. But until they offer a more transparent, more predictable, and repeatable set of configurations for highly regulated industries, the onus remains on the partners and customers to build, deploy, and maintain the final, compliant solution. The sophisticated “building blocks” are here, but the “regulated answer” is still a required assembly task.

The Path Forward – Assembling the Finished Solution

The conversation with Joel confirms a crucial and cruel reality: Microsoft’s suite of content services—from SharePoint to the new AI features—is a robust, sophisticated set of building blocks, but they are not yet complete, regulated solutions. The strategic focus is on providing flexible technology (Content Services), not the structured, end-to-end answers demanded by modern businesses, particularly those in highly regulated sectors.

The key is achieving repeatability of the IDP configuration, governance, and output across different projects and document types (e.g., invoices, contracts, forms).

Stakeholder	Actionable Goal for IDP	Repeatable Mechanism Required Non-LEGO Style
Microsoft Partners (ISVs/SIs)	Productize Document Automation: Move beyond custom configuration of Syntex/Copilot/AI Builder. Develop pre-trained models and packaged flows for high-volume, regulated documents.	IDP Solution Templates: Create reusable Power Platform solutions (incorporating AI Builder models and Syntex content center settings) that automatically extract, govern, and route specific document types (e.g., a “Vendor Invoice Processing Pack”).
Enterprise Customers	Standardize Document Intake: Define standardized processes and templates for how specific document types are handled, regardless of where they enter M365 (Email, Teams, SharePoint).	Governed Content Center Blueprints: Establish standardized Content Centers that mandate training document models and apply corresponding Purview retention and sensitivity labels to critical documents upon ingestion.
Microsoft (Developer Perspective)	Enable IDP Configuration Portability: Provide a unified method to capture and redeploy the entire IDP setup, including the AI model training, metadata mapping, and subsequent governance rules.	Unified IDP Solution Export/Import: Offer a tool or API that can export a complete, governed “Document Understanding” configuration (AI models + Purview policies) for rapid and repeatable deployment across tenancies.

Microsoft lays the foundation for Intelligent Document Processing. Now, the ecosystem, regardless of whether you’re customer, partner, ISV or MVP must focus on constructing a repeatable, automated, actionable and compliant IDP response to bridge the gap between AI capabilities and structured business outcomes, and this is how the Autofill experience should function if you’d ask me

ODSP and the Power Platform should act as universal triggers—regardless of where a document is stored. When creating an Autofill column, I should be able to choose any location as the source, such as a Teams chat, a OneDrive folder, or even another channel from a different Microsoft Team.

For example, imagine centralizing expense data from 50 different project teams into a single document library. The IDP should then process it and write the results back to SharePoint or Dataverse.

Many will ask, “Why use Dataverse?”
Dataverse is the central data platform within the Power Platform, designed to store structured and relational information. It becomes especially valuable when you need advanced capabilities, such as complex data relationships and robust security, or when building model-driven Power Apps. Once your data is in Dataverse, you unlock a wide range of possibilities — including making that data easily accessible to Citizen Developers for building apps and flows.

Hope that helps!

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