Catalog management in SharePoint Advanced Management

Catalog management is included inSharePoint Advanced Management, designed to provide organizations with a comprehensive view of content distribution across regions, departments, users, information barriers, and custom properties defined by you. By leveraging built-in Microsoft 365 site and user metadata, catalog management allows organizations to group related sites into logical categories for targeted actions such as content monitoring, policy enforcement, and Copilot grounding. This structured approach streamlines processes like billing, reporting, and access management, resulting in consistent governance, reduced administrative overhead, and precise targeting for lifecycle management and security controls throughout the organization.

What you need for Catalog management

What are the license requirements?

Your organization needs to have the right license and meet certain administrative permissions or roles to use the feature described in this article.

First, your organization must have one of the following base licenses:

• Office 365 E3, E5, or A5
• Microsoft 365 E1, E3, E5, or A5

Additionally, you need at least one of these licenses:

• Microsoft 365 Copilot license: At least one user in your organization must be assigned a Copilot license (this user doesn't need to be a SharePoint administrator).
• Microsoft SharePoint Advanced Management license: Available as a standalone purchase.

Administrator requirements

You must be a SharePoint administrator or have equivalent permissions.

Additional information

If your organization has a Copilot license and at least one person in your organization is assigned a Copilot license, SharePoint administrators automatically gain access to the SharePoint Advanced Management features needed for Copilot deployment.

For organizations without a Copilot license, you can use SharePoint Advanced Management features by purchasing a standalone SharePoint Advanced Management license.

Get started with Catalog management

To get started with Catalog management, log into in 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 are what these properties mean:

• Locale: The region of where the content is hosted. (e.g., North America vs. Europe).
• Department: The organizational units associated with the site (e.g., finance department).
• User type: Guest or not Guest.
• Preferred data location (PDL): The multigeo setup for your sites.
• Information barriers segment: The segment defined by information barriers policies (for organizations that have implemented 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. You can change 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 and doesn't alter the underlying metadata or impact site grouping logic.