Microsoft’s latest foray into the content AI sector is a rebrand of one of its SharePoint solutions for digital asset management. The tech giant relaunched Microsoft Syntex – previously branded as SharePoint Syntex – during its annual Ignite conference on Wednesday, October 12th.
The new and improved Syntex is a toolkit composed of content applications, low-code tools, and AI-driven services geared towards streamlining content development and management within organizations.
Spurred Forward by Progress
The redevelopment of the system was spurred on by the way processes have become digitized or automated throughout the past decade, which also saw the en masse migration of business documents to the cloud.
According to Microsoft president for collaborative applications and platforms, Jeff Teper, the number of documents imported to the cloud on Microsoft 365 has grown tenfold in less than a decade, growing by 1.6 billion documents a day.
However, this shift to digital storage – partly spurred on by the need to reduce the use of paper and to improve overall efficiency – has brought the number of documents stored virtually to a critical point. As a result, people waste their time going through digital archives to get the information they need. Moreover, companies spend nearly $46 billion annually on inefficient content storage and management systems.
Improved Capabilities
To address these issues, the improved Syntex platform offers over 300 content types and eleven core capabilities, including document processing and summarization, content assembly, multimedia processing, search, and annotation.
The platform also offers codeless AI to enhance one’s content, enabling organizations to simplify their operational workflows by helping those concerned understand and structure the information.
Syntex was built upon Microsoft’s low-code tool set Power Platform. The coding capabilities built into it are expected to help users create more streamlined workflows and efficiently automate business processes.
A System by Any Other Name
According to Gartner senior director analyst Larry Cannell, the way the platform has been rebranded as Microsoft Syntex shows that the enhanced capabilities will considerably improve Microsoft’s AI portfolio, but is rather skeptical that the company refers to it as content AI. He remarked that the description of Syntex’s core market is essentially what much of the tech world has referred to for years as content management.
Teper, however, explains that Microsoft has refined its technology for its prebuilt AI models under the Azure Cognitive Services label. In doing so, the company was able to take a number of capabilities from its current tech stack and add them to the new Syntex suite.
