This blog is published hot in the heels of the public announcement of SharePoint Embedded going into Public Preview. During its early life through development and developer preview stages this was known as Syntex Repository as a Service (RaaS) and also Repository Services. SharePoint Embedded will offer a great foundation for ISVs to deliver extended extranet, DMS and CMS scenarios.
Atlas by ClearPeople is a Microsoft Content AI preferred partner and one of Microsoft’s launch partners with a SharePoint Embedded roadmap.
If you have not heard about SharePoint Embedded before, or you want to understand how Atlas will leverage this new capability, please read on.
SharePoint Embedded targets application developers, as a faster way to build file and document focused apps. SharePoint Embedded is powered by SharePoint and therefore enable support for critical Microsoft 365 file and document capabilities within third party apps. SharePoint Embedded in themselves have no user experience layer (this is often referenced as a “headless” CMS) and is fully API driven.
Leveraging Microsoft 365 file and document capabilities allows software companies – such as ClearPeople - to include critical Microsoft 365 file and document capabilities within applications and platforms faster, allowing us to focus on use case specific scenarios and bring our applications to market faster.
Conceptually, the diagram below gives a good overview of SharePoint Embedded:
SharePoint Embedded is already available now for public preview, with general availability planned for mid-2024. It’s available under pay-as-you-go consumption terms, meaning you pay for the storage you use and the volume of API calls and data transfers – without the need for additional user licenses.
The pay-as-you-go (PAYG) is billed through an Azure subscription, and is determined by how much data in GB you store in SharePoint Embedded, transactions used to modify and data that is egressed while using application built on SharePoint Embedded.
SharePoint Embedded Feature Preview pricing is as follows:
|
SharePoint Embedded Service Meters |
Meter Unit |
Price |
|
Storage |
$/GB/Day |
$0.00667 |
|
Graph API Transactions Class A |
$/1 API call |
$0.00050 |
|
Graph API Transactions Class B |
$/1 API call |
$0.00075 |
|
Express Egress |
$/GB |
$0.12 |
The full details and up to date pricing can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/embedded/terms-of-service
The table above obviously opens up for more questions than it might answer, such as what are the two transaction classes, and when do you need to you express egress. We aim to answer these questions in more details in an updated version of this article.
A number of obvious use cases stand out, including the following three:
|
CMS for third party platforms |
Third party SaaS platform ISVs such as Peppermint are a good example, and they were quick to announce their intent to store opportunity related documentation created or shared in their CRM platform within SharePoint Embedded. |
|
Simple but secure data sharing |
Professional Service provides – such as BDO – intend to offer a document layer or service alongside their tax, audit and advisory services. |
|
External Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing |
The use case for Atlas is organisations with a strategic knowledge productivity approach and who invest in an Intelligent Knowledge Platform. They will want to extend their reach further than just for their internal users, and will want their external partners such as their customers, suppliers or advisors to get the best possible and most efficient experience as well. |
Atlas customers already benefit from Atlas’ system design having been built on and for Microsoft 365. Atlas is deployed within the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant boundary and every Atlas customer therefore implicitly leverages and gets all the benefits of Microsoft 365 security and compliance within Atlas, in addition to all the trusted Microsoft content management capabilities.
This is the standard – and has always been standard – approach for Atlas, which means Atlas customers do not need to take any action to leverage the same benefits as SharePoint Embedded offer.
However, Atlas customers will soon be able to go further.
Atlas will offer new experiences – leveraging SharePoint Embedded - for external collaboration and knowledge sharing, including:
I encourage existing Atlas customers to speak to your Customer Success Agent or your account manager, to hear more about these capabilities and the Atlas roadmap with SharePoint Embedded.
If you are not already an Atlas customer, please get in touch and we will be happy to discuss your requirements and how Atlas, together with SharePoint Embedded, may be a great fit for your organization.
Gabriel is Co-Founder of ClearPeople, responsible for the overall technical and Atlas Intelligent Knowledge Platform vision. He works closely with colleagues at Microsoft on roadmap alignment and innovative Content AI Services programs such as Microsoft Viva Topics and SharePoint Premium (previously known as Syntex). Gabriel was part of Microsoft's partner program for Project Cortex.
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