Microsoft is adding updates to Syntex, its content understanding, processing, and compliance service, that leverages content AI and machine learning to provide an end-to-end Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution.

Ian Story, Microsoft Syntex’ Director of Product Development, said: “Our biggest set of announcements in Syntex until Ignite in a month – a preview of seat features available for all pay-as-you-go customers! Plus, OCR (with support for TIFF and PDF!), structured & freeform document processing, image tagging and taxonomy tagging rolling out too!”

Syntex Taxonomy Tagging uses AI to tag documents automatically with descriptive keywords based on a taxonomy defined in SharePoint. Syntex Image Tagging does the same for images. Other new features include content queries and universal annotations; the general availability of Syntex OCR (Optical Character Recognition) (for automatically extracting printed or handwritten text from images, now with PDF and TIFF support); and Syntex Structured document processing.

Microsoft Syntex is a content understanding service that uses AI and ML to analyse and understand unstructured data such as documents, emails, and images. This enables businesses to extract insights and value from their data, and to automate workflows and processes.

With the new pay-as-you-go option, businesses can start using Syntex immediately and only pay for the services they use, without any upfront costs or long-term commitments. This makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to access the benefits of AI and ML, without having to invest heavily in infrastructure and expertise.

The pay-as-you-go option is available through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, and businesses can choose from a range of different pricing tiers based on their usage needs. This allows businesses to easily calculate the cost of using Syntex, and to only pay for the services they use.

For a limited time, Syntex pay-as-you-go users now get to use all the Syntex features previously only available to customers with the SharePoint Syntex seat license. These services will be available as a preview through June 30, 2024.

1. Content query – an advanced, powerful search with custom metadata in a form-based interface
2. Universal annotation – add ink and highlights to additional file types like PDF & TIFF supported by our file viewer
3. Accelerators – preconfigured templates that leverage Syntex capabilities in an end-to-end solution for common scenarios like contract management and accounts payable
4. Taxonomy services – admin reporting on term set usage, easy import from SKOS-formatted taxonomies, and the ability to push a content type to a hub
5. Content processing rules – lightweight automation for common operations such as moving or copying a file, and setting a content type from the file name or path in SharePoint
6. PDF merge/extract – combine two or more PDF files into a new PDF file, or extract pages from one PDF into a new one

Syntex optical character recognition (OCR) automatically extracts the printed or handwritten text from images containing text – such as screenshots, scanned documents, or photographs - and makes it discoverable, searchable, and indexable.

It can be used for image-only files, now including PDF and TIFF, in OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, Windows devices and Teams messages. Searching for images is improved thanks to OCR, and IT admins can better secure images across OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, Teams and Windows devices with data loss prevention (DLP) policies.