Catalog management in SharePoint Advanced Management

Catalog management in SharePoint Advanced Management helps you understand how content is organized across your SharePoint environment. It uses existing Microsoft 365 metadata to automatically group sites into meaningful categories, giving you a centralized view of your content landscape.

By grouping sites into categories and groups, you can analyze content, apply governance actions at scale, and gain the insight needed to manage content, reduce risk, and prepare for AI-powered experiences such as Microsoft 365 Copilot.

How catalog management works

Catalog management organizes SharePoint sites into categories and groups based on metadata already present in your Microsoft 365 tenant.

• Categories are high-level classifications such as department, user type, or region.
• Groups provide more detail within each category. For example, within the Department category, groups might include Marketing, Sales, HR, or Finance.

This structure helps you understand how content is distributed and governed across your organization.

You can use built-in categories or add your own categories. Each category has a label that identifies its type:

• BUILT-IN
• UPLOADED
• CUSTOM PROPERTIES
• ENTRA ID

Metadata sources

Catalog management uses metadata from multiple sources to define categories and groups:

• Microsoft Entra ID: Organizational attributes such as department, user type, and extension attributes
• SharePoint site metadata: Site properties such as property bag values, site keywords, and other SharePoint-defined properties

Because catalog management reflects existing metadata, keeping that metadata accurate and consistent is essential for meaningful results.

Built-in categories

Catalog management includes built-in categories derived from Microsoft Entra ID and SharePoint metadata. Common examples include:

• Locale: The region where the content is hosted (for example, North America versus Europe).
• Department: The organizational units associated with the site (for example, Finance).
• User type: Guest or nonguest.
• 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.

These categories are automatically populated, available without configuration, and refreshed every hour.

Categories you can add (private preview)

In addition to built-in categories, you can create categories from the following sources:

Upload a CSV site list

1. In the SharePoint admin center, in the navigation pane, go to Reports > Catalog management.

2. Select Add category. In the Add category pane, select CSV site lists.

3. Specify a category name and description.

4. Download the CSV template and use it to create your lists. Create one CSV file for each group that you want to create in your category. You can have up to 20 groups in a category.

5. In the Add category pane, upload a CSV file. If you have more than one, use Add group for each additional CSV file.

6. Select Save.

Use a custom site property

Use this option if your organization already stores classification information in SharePoint site properties, such as department, region, business unit, or compliance designation. Catalog management doesn't create or populate the property values. Instead, it reads existing property values and uses them to create categories and groups. This approach allows you to use metadata that already exists in your environment to organize sites without maintaining manual site lists.

Example: Use a Department site property

Suppose your organization already uses a custom site property named Department in the SharePoint site property bag. The property might contain values such as:

• Department = Marketing
• Department = Finance
• Department = Human Resources

When you create a catalog category and specify Department as the custom property, catalog management scans the selected sites and creates groups based on the values it finds. In this example, catalog management creates separate groups for Marketing, Finance, and Human Resources, and places sites into the appropriate group automatically.

After you determine the site properties you want to use, connect them to catalog management.

Connect custom site properties to catalog management

1. In the SharePoint admin center, in the navigation pane, go to Reports > Catalog management.

2. Select Add category. In the Add category pane, select Custom properties.

3. In the Properties section, enter the name of a property that you want to use. To add more properties, select Add property. You can specify up to 20 properties.

4. Under Sites, select one of the following options:

   • Most active sites (up to 20,000 sites): Data is available within 24 hours and refreshes automatically every two weeks.
   • Upload a list of up to 20,000 sites: Download the CSV template and use it to create your site list. Then upload the CSV file. Keep in mind that with this option, the list of sites in the category serves as a snapshot that you must update manually.

5. Select Save.

Use Microsoft Entra ID extension attributes

If your organization uses Microsoft Entra ID extension attributes, you can create catalog categories based on the values stored in extensionAttribute1 through extensionAttribute15. Extension attributes are predefined attributes in Microsoft Entra ID that organizations can use to store extra string-based metadata for user or device objects.

Catalog management uses these existing attribute values to group SharePoint sites into categories. When you select one or more Microsoft Entra ID extension attributes as catalog categories, Catalog management groups sites based on the extension attribute values associated with site owners. These groupings update when the underlying attribute values or site ownership changes.

For example, your organization might use an extension attribute to identify a business unit, operating model, compliance boundary, program, or other internal classification that isn't represented by a built-in category such as Department or User type. By using that extension attribute as a catalog category, you can view and manage related sites together without manually maintaining a separate site list.

Before you use extension attributes with catalog management, make sure the attributes are populated consistently in Microsoft Entra ID. Catalog management reflects the metadata that already exists in your tenant, so incomplete or inconsistent values can result in incomplete or inconsistent site groupings.

Identify or set extension attributes

To view a list of existing extension attributes or to set them, follow the guidance in Extension attributes. You can identify or set extension attributes by using PowerShell, Python, and more.

After you identify your extension attributes, use them to add categories.

Use extension attributes with catalog management

1. In the SharePoint admin center, in the navigation pane, go to Reports > Catalog management.

2. Select Add category. In the Add category pane, select Entra ID extension attributes.

3. In the Entra ID extension attributes list, select the attributes that you want to use as categories.

4. Select Save.

Edit a category or group

You can change the display name of any category, and you can edit categories that aren't built in. Depending on the category type, you can edit display names, descriptions, groups, and site lists. Editing a display name doesn't change the underlying metadata or site grouping.

1. In the SharePoint admin center, in the navigation pane, go to Reports > Catalog management.

2. Select a category or group to open the editing pane.

3. Take one or more of the following actions:

   1. To change the name of a category, select Edit display name and enter a new name.

   2. To edit a category, select Edit category, and then modify its name and description as needed.

   3. To edit, add, or remove a group, in the Groups section, select Edit, Delete, or Add group.

4. Select Save.

Integration with the SharePoint Admin Agent

Catalog management provides structure that improves the effectiveness of the SharePoint Admin Agent. When you categorize sites, the SharePoint Admin Agent can provide more targeted insights, analysis, and governance recommendations based on how content is organized across your tenant. For more information, see SharePoint Admin Agent.

See also

• SharePoint Advanced Management overview
• SharePoint Admin Agent
• SharePoint Advanced Management prerequisites