Intrazone Podcast Host Outlines His Top Five SharePoint Features

Mark Kashman, a well-known SharePoint marketing manager and host of the Intrazone podcast, recently published a wrap-up of SharePoint Online for 2024. I’ll leave you to read the full text if you’re interested, but my attention was attracted by two of the topics covered.

Top Five SharePoint Features Shipped in 2024

First, Mark listed his “top five SharePoint and related tech items that shipped in 2024,” namely:

#5: Copilot in OneDrive.

#4: SharePoint Premium.

#3: Microsoft 365 Backup.

#2: Microsoft Lists: New forms experience.

#1: SharePoint agents. I agree that this is the #1 new feature (trivia note: Microsoft recently changed the extension used for agents from .copilot to .agent).

All are worthy advances, but what drew my attention is that four of the five represent opportunities for Microsoft to increase license revenue. Consider the following:

• You can’t use Copilot in OneDrive unless you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license ($360/user/year).
• SharePoint Premium has a pay-as-you-go (PAYG), so the cost depends on usage of features like eSignature, OCR, document processing models, and translation. It’s easy to accrue quite a bill for functions like document translation, albeit at a much lower cost than doing the work manually.
• Microsoft 365 Backup is also funded on PAYG. My experience is that Microsoft 365 Backup costs are quite reasonable. Some ISVs have integrated the Microsoft Backup API into their own products, so you can choose between the Microsoft implementation and an ISV solution.
• Access to SharePoint agents (Figure 1) are controlled by Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. However, a trial running between January 6 and June 30, 2025, allows up to 10,000 free SharePoint agent queries per month for unlicensed users. See this page for more details. If you don’t have Microsoft 365 Copilot, you should definitely take advantage of the trial to establish if agents can do a job for your tenant.

If 80% of the top five SharePoint features shipped in 2024 cost tenants extra, it’s fair to ask if Microsoft has lost sight of delighting the Microsoft 365 installed base to chase additional revenues? I think this is true, and it’s driven by two factors: the need to get a return on its investment in AI coupled with a decline in the growth rate for new customers, something that almost became inevitable because of the size of Microsoft 365. I expect the trend to continue in 2025.

Archival of Unlicensed OneDrive for Business Accounts Begins on January 27

One thing that Kashman didn’t mention is Microsoft 365 Archive, a solution that’s about to become a lot more obvious when Microsoft begins the archival of unlicensed OneDrive for Business accounts from January 27, 2025. Tenants will need an Azure subscription linked to a credit card to pay for the storage of unlicensed OneDrive accounts subject to a retention hold (policy, label, or legal hold) and any operations to access data from the unlicensed accounts.

One point to note here is that the retrieval of data from any account automatically means that a tenant must begin to pay for the storage of every archived account. For instance, if a tenant has 100 unlicensed accounts that are in Microsoft 365 Archive and they need to retrieve data from one, they must pay for the storage of all 100 accounts before they can retrieve data from any of the accounts. Unlike the archival of SharePoint Online sites, Microsoft doesn’t offset the fees charged for storage of unlicensed OneDrive accounts against the unused portion of the tenant SharePoint storage quota. The entire consumption amount is billed. $0.05/GB/month mightn’t sound a lot, but it can mount up.

Twenty-Two Local Microsoft Datacenter Regions

The blog also featured the introduction of a new Microsoft 365 cloud region in New Zealand in December 2024 and pointed to similar developments over the last 20 months in  Poland (April 2023) Italy (June 2023), Mexico (May 2024), Spain (May 2024), and Taiwan (November 2024). In recent years, Microsoft has steadily built out the collection of in-country cloud regions to make it easier for customers to keep their data at rest within their preferred country using either multi-geo deployments or Advanced Data Residency (ADR).

The difference between the two data residency solutions is that multi-geo deployments can operate at a per-account level (the tenant has a home geography while users can be spread across multiple satellite regions) while ADR focuses on guaranteeing that tenant data for core workloads is stored at rest in a designated region. The core workloads include Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Teams.

When Microsoft launched Office 365, the original focus was to serve customers from large regional datacenter deployments like the U.S. and EMEA. That focus gradually changed to deliver services from countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, India, and France. Microsoft doesn’t say what selection criteria it uses to choose where it deploys local datacenters, but it’s probably a mixture of the demand for cloud services and the desire for data sovereignty within a country. With the addition of New Zealand, there are now 22 county-level regions:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• India
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Mexico
• New Zealand
• Norway
• Poland
• Qatar
• South Africa
• South Korea
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom.

It’s an impressive list that is likely to grow in 2025.

Top Features Cost Money

Microsoft 365 is a very healthy and successful ecosystem. It helps hundreds of millions of people get their jobs done daily. The level of functionality in some of its applications is staggering and the ingenuity and dedication behind delivering a reliable service across so many datacenters worldwide is commendable. The cost of Microsoft 365 base licenses is reasonable. It’s just a pity that the goodness is tinged by a blunt desire to extract more revenue per user. I guess it’s the way of the future.

Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.