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SharePoint Embedded Latest Idea to Exploit SharePoint Storage
Microsoft executives love to cite statistics to prove the power of technology during conference keynotes. Thus we heard from SharePoint overload Jeff Teper that Microsoft 365 users currently generate new 2.3 billion documents for SharePoint Online daily. Teper delivered the statistic with great gusto during his keynote at the European SharePoint Conference (ESPC 23) in Amsterdam last week, and it, along with the announcement about the public preview for SharePoint Embedded, got me thinking about the role of SharePoint Online within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
Over two billion documents created daily seems like a lot of content. Given that Office 365 has over 400 million paid seats and (possibly more importantly) Teams has more than 320 million monthly active users, it works out at about six new pieces of content per user daily. Microsoft didn’t say if the figure was for business days, so we’ll assume it is a daily average. Given that people work every day, that’s a reasonable assumption.
Six new pieces of content is a lot for some people and not for others. It’s not just Office documents because SharePoint Online has become the storage engine for many Microsoft 365 applications. Of course, classic SharePoint and OneDrive for Business usage drives a lot f consumption, but then there’s Teams meeting recordings, whiteboards, Stream videos, files migrated from on-premises and other platforms, Microsoft Lists, Loop workspaces, and all the other information introduced into SharePoint through apps and connectors.
As always, Microsoft provides very little context for a headline figure used in conference sessions, so we assume that very item created in SharePoint Online storage counts towards the total. The actual number of Office documents created in SharePoint Online by humans daily is probably much smaller than 2.3 billion, but there’s no doubt that more content is created than ever before.
Apps and Technology Improve the SharePoint Experience
I believe that Teams exerts huge influence over the demand for SharePoint Online storage. Soon after its introduction, I said that Teams delivers a human interface for SharePoint (and OneDrive for Business). Sure, people use the SharePoint browser client to work with documents, but it’s much easier to use Teams and store files in SharePoint sites without realizing that’s what’s happening.
The OneDrive sync client is an important factor here too. Microsoft’s first sync client was awful, but the current generation works very well and makes it easy to keep local copies of files synchronized with the server. Features like auto save build on OneDrive synchronization and make sure that work done in Office documents is now hardly ever lost, even after catastrophic PC failures.
SharePoint Embedded, Apps, and Costs
To return to the original announcement, SharePoint Embedded is a renaming of Syntex Repository Services, revealed earlier this year as the storage location for Loop workspaces. SharePoint Embedded is also used by Microsoft Designer (Figure 1). The big news is that Microsoft is making SharePoint Embedded available to customers and ISVs to store their application data.
Holding data in SharePoint Embedded is an attractive notion because it allows applications to take advantage of Microsoft security and compliance features and the availability delivered by the Microsoft Cloud datacenter network. The downside is ceding some level of control over applications to Microsoft and an uncertain cost model.
Computing services must be paid for and SharePoint Embedded uses the pay-as-you-go model for storage and the Graph API transactions executed by applications to interact with SharePoint. Cost and licensing details are available online but the raw detail must be converted into actual costs based on an application profile before developers understand how much they need to charge to turn a profit. Experience will help people estimate costs more accurately over time. For now, Microsoft outlines the costs listed in Table 1. These are for the preview of SharePoint Embedded and may change when the service is generally available.
| SharePoint Embedded Service Meters | Meter Unit | Price |
| Storage | $/GB/Day | $0.00667 |
| Graph API Transactions Class A | $ per API call | $0.00050 |
| Graph API Transactions Class B | $ per API call | $0.00075 |
| Express Egress | $/GB | $0.12 |
I can find no detailed information about what class A and class B transactions mean, unless these refer to the same definitions as used for the Teams Graph APIs where class A means transactions that perform a security or compliance function and class B do not.
Interpreting the potential costs for an application based on SharePoint Embedded will require some testing and analysis of the information reported for the Azure subscription used to pay.
More Business Opportunities
The large and increasing size of the Microsoft 365 installed base creates significant business opportunities for Microsoft to upsell services to its customers. SharePoint Premium (introduced at Ignite 2023 and tagged as the “next evolution for Syntex“) includes advanced content management and some new services, like SharePoint Signature (apply eSignatures to documents). Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive are other monetization opportunities, both of which use the pay-as-you-go model.
SharePoint Embedded is another way for Microsoft to create value from its Microsoft 365 infrastructure. It seems like a good idea. Time will tell if it is.
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6 new documents or even items is unthinkable for me 🙂 But i work in IT. Throughout my day i usually update 5 or so existing documents, but only maybe create one new in 2 days (and it could be small txt for some note or downloaded report from a service).