Catalog management in SharePoint Advanced Management

Catalog management in SharePoint Advanced Management provides a centralized view of how content is distributed across your organization by automatically grouping sites based on existing Microsoft 365 metadata, such as region, department, and user attributes.

When you enable SharePoint Advanced Management, you get catalog management by default. It requires no extra configuration, so your administrators can immediately explore your content landscape. Instead of enforcing policies directly, catalog management helps you understand how content is organized. You can target governance actions, such as monitoring, lifecycle management, and access controls more effectively across groups of related sites.

Use catalog management to guide governance decisions

Catalog management helps you identify patterns in how content is organized and where it resides. It makes it easier to take targeted action across groups of sites. For example, your SharePoint administrators can review sites grouped by department to identify business units with large volumes of content or potential oversharing risks. They can use region-based groupings to understand how data is distributed across geographies. You might also focus on sites with guest users to prioritize external sharing reviews. Use catalog groupings to identify clusters of sites that might require lifecycle actions, such as cleanup or ownership validation.

In practice, catalog management provides the context needed to apply other SharePoint Advanced Management capabilities more effectively. You can use these groupings to scope data access governance reports, align lifecycle policies to specific site segments, or apply access controls more consistently across similar types of sites. By using catalog insights to guide where and how governance actions are applied, you can scale your governance approach while maintaining consistency across your tenant.

How to get catalog management

Catalog management is enabled automatically when you add SharePoint Advanced Management capabilities to your tenant through a Microsoft 365 Copilot or SharePoint Advanced Management Plan 1 license.

See SharePoint Advanced Management prerequisites.

Get started with Catalog management

To get started with Catalog management, sign in to the SharePoint admin center:

1. Select Reports > Catalog management.

2. See how your content is distributed across your organization. Currently, you can view the distributions by five default properties: locale, department, user type, preferred data location (PDL), and Information barriers segment.

Here's what these properties mean:

• Locale: The region where the content is hosted (for example, North America vs. Europe).
• Department: The organizational units associated with the site (for example, finance department).
• User type: Guest or not Guest.
• Preferred data location (PDL): The multi-geo setup for your sites.
• Information barriers segment: The segment defined by information barriers policies (for organizations that implement information barriers).

How can you change property names in Catalog management?

You can customize property names to better align with your organization's terminology. For example, you might rename "Locale" to "Location" for clarity. Change the display name of the property by selecting the property name and typing in the display name you prefer.

Changing property names only affects how properties are displayed in Catalog management. It doesn't change the underlying metadata or affect site grouping logic.