This article was originally written by Avanade alum Michelle Caldwell and Ruven Gotz.

As SharePoint has grown over the years to dominate the enterprise for content management, Microsoft has added features like metadata, content types and views that aid with content taxonomy and support powerful findability. However, over the past several years there hasn’t been much more added to those features and some started to feel that Microsoft wasn’t really focusing on this important area. Turning that assumption upside down, Microsoft has renewed their investment in content management and are rapidly adding new capabilities and tools.

Microsoft is doing more than just investing in new features and technologies, they are making sure their investments are relevant to the marketplace by creating a new Content Services Partner Program. Avanade is a charter company member of this program and has two individual members (the authors of this post) sitting on the board. As charter members, we are helping Microsoft to shape the direction of Content Services based on the experience we have gained delivering solutions to our large global enterprise clients.

Some of the great new additions to Content Services include the use of AI to recognize content in images and convert words into searchable text, capture location and populate metadata based on that. The growing importance of video is highlighted by the ability to automatically transcribe video so that searches will take you to the point in the video where those words were said. Critically important features are the automatic labelling of content for security and compliance based on patterns of text (e.g. PII) and making it faster and easier to detect and fix mis-tagged items through attention views. The incorporation of PowerApps to make it easier to build attractive SharePoint forms for adding content with proper metadata and the addition of Microsoft Flow to make it easy to build both simple and complex approval processes has added even more value to the platform.

These Content Services capabilities are part of SharePoint, which is the underlying platform for content across Microsoft365 and OneDrive. As users work with content across the suite, from Microsoft Teams to Planner to OneDrive and more, the security, compliance and search tools are automatically a part of all content and are constantly being improved and enhanced.

It’s true: Content is King and content includes much more than text; it’s audio, video, images, documents, tasks and more. Avanade understands how much value you have in your content and how to apply Microsoft’s rapidly advancing platform to build engaging experiences that intelligently deliver value from that content in context. Long live the King!