
SharePoint Syntex was announced as the first feature of Project Cortex at Microsoft Ignite, a few weeks ago. It is generally available from October 1 – let’s see how to enable it for your organization.
Buy a subscription (or start a 30-day trial)
First, you need to start a trial or buy a subscription HERE. Log in with your organization account, and follow the instructions.

Once the subscription is purchased, you have to activate the feature in Microsoft 365. For this, go to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, choose Setup and scroll down to Organizational Knowledge. Click on “Automate content understanding” here:

You’ll get a “welcome” screen here, click on “Get started“:

Configure Form Processing
The next step is basic configuration of Form Processing. Form processing models can read, extract and process data from semi-structured documents, PDFs, scans, etc.

Create a Content Center
The Content Center is a SharePoint site. Members of this site can build content understanding models for unstructured content like emails, notes, etc.

Once these steps are done, you can review and activate SharePoint Syntex. The activation process takes a few minutes, please do NOT close the window while it’s running.
Once done, you’ll get a message about the successful activation:

Content Center
To verify that the activation of SharePoint Syntex Content Understanding was successful, go to the site you’ve defined above as the default content center. The site will look like this:

What’s Next?
In the next parts of this series, I’m going through the available features and how they work in SharePoint Syntex.
To learn more, visit Microsoft’s Resource Center HERE.
404 error for me also. Anyone any ideas?
As Stuart says below: go to Active Sites, create a new site using the Content Center template – and you should be all good. For some reason the initial site did not completely provision.
Hi Agnes,
I followed your instructions (thanks!) and hit a couple of issues when I chose All SharePoint sites when choosing where to active this. It failed twice but then I picked a specific site and it worked fine.
Looking forward to later posts.
Cheers
Tony
Good to know, thank you Tony. More post are coming for sure!
You can simply go into Active Sites, create a new site using the Content Center template – and boom you are done – for some reason the initial site did not completely provision.
Perfect, thank you Stuart!
Sad panda. I ran through these instructions (which I *never* would have figured out without them!), got the green lights on “Content understanding activated”, and when I try to go to the Syntex site (I copied you), I get a 404. It’s in the Active sites listing, so it ought to be there. Any tips?
Actually, no idea 🙁 For me, it was there right after the process finished, but maybe it takes a while until everything is up and running? Did you try again later?
Sadly, no joy. I can’t figure out a way to start over, either.
M.
Thanks for the guidance – again would not have found this relying on microsoft 🙁
got he same results as Marc – green light completed but site not actually loading.
Experienced a similar thing setting up hybrid search – only to put in a support ticket – for microsoft to admit that they had put a check process in place to stop automatic provisioning etc.
Will put a support ticket in and see what happens
Marc, Stuart,
Contact Microsoft then for sure. It must be a bug.
I’d be curious what the solution will be.