SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) — part of SharePoint Premium — is Microsoft's own answer to oversharing: Data Access Governance reports, sharing-links reports, and a set of governance controls, sitting behind a per-user add-on licence or a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. If your organisation needs the governance suite, it may earn its keep. If what you need is the external who-can-access-what picture, here is the focused alternative.
What SAM is
SAM lives in the SharePoint admin center and extends it with governance reporting and controls: the Data Access Governance (DAG) reports on sharing links and oversharing, the "Everyone except external users" (EEEU) report, plus policy features such as site lifecycle management and restricted access control. It is licensed per user, its surface is the admin center — an IT-administrator tool — its scope is SharePoint Online, and it runs tenant-side, in the service.
Side by side
| SharePoint Advanced Management | TRACER365 | |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing | Per-user add-on, or included with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence | $490/yr flat, per installation, published openly |
| Scope | Governance controls and reports across SharePoint Online | Focused external-sharing audit across SharePoint and OneDrive |
| Findings model | Report catalogue (DAG, sharing links, EEEU) — you assemble the picture | Nine severity-ranked finding types, cascade de-duplicated (~91% of raw findings collapsed as duplicates in our testing) |
| Deployment | Tenant-side, in the SharePoint admin center | Local Windows app, read-only scopes, data never leaves your environment |
| Audience | IT administrators | IT + business reviewers (viewer role, scheduled email reports) |
| Cadence | Reports generated on demand in the admin center | Scheduled scans with email reports |
When SAM is the right call
Honestly: if you need the broader governance controls — site lifecycle policies for inactive sites, conditional access and restricted access control for sites, restricted content discoverability — an add-on that governs is the right shape, and SAM is Microsoft's own. TRACER365 deliberately does none of that: it is a read-only audit. It does not govern, remediate, or change anything in the tenant.
When the focused tool wins
- The question is external exposure. You need the complete, ranked, reviewable picture of what the tenant shares externally — across SharePoint and OneDrive, including inherited access — not a governance programme.
- No licence wall. No per-user add-on across the whole tenant, no Copilot licence as the door key — we wrote a separate guide to the DAG licence wall.
- Local and read-only. The audit runs in your environment and its data stays there.
- Business-readable. A viewer role and scheduled email reports put the exposure list in front of the person who owns the data, not only the admin center.
- One published price. Flat per installation, on a public page — no per-seat maths across the tenant.