If your team is using Microsoft 365 primarily for email and Word documents, you're leaving a significant amount of value on the table every single month. Research consistently shows that the average business uses less than 20% of their M365 features — yet they're paying for the full subscription.
This isn't a criticism. Microsoft 365 is a sprawling platform with hundreds of applications and features. It takes expertise to know which ones are worth investing time in, how to configure them correctly, and how to build the adoption habits that make them stick.
Start With Security — It's Included in Your License
Many businesses spend money on third-party security tools when they already have powerful security capabilities built into their M365 subscription. Depending on your license tier, you likely already have access to:
- Microsoft Defender for Business — endpoint protection with threat detection across Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android
- Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) — identity management, Conditional Access policies, and privileged identity management
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365 — anti-phishing, safe links, and safe attachments for email
- Microsoft Purview — data classification, sensitivity labels, and compliance tools
- Microsoft Secure Score — a dashboard that tells you exactly where your security gaps are
We regularly see businesses paying separately for tools they already have in their M365 subscription. A proper M365 security review almost always finds overlap and savings.
Multi-Factor Authentication: Still the Most Impactful Control
If you haven't enforced multi-factor authentication across your entire organization, that's the single highest-impact change you can make right now. Microsoft estimates that MFA blocks over 99.9% of account compromise attacks. It's included in every M365 subscription and takes hours to deploy properly.
MFA is the lowest-hanging, highest-value security control available to every M365 customer. There's no excuse not to have it enforced across the board.
SharePoint and Teams: Your Intranet and Collaboration Platform
Teams and SharePoint are often underused or used poorly. Here's what a well-configured environment actually looks like:
- SharePoint as your internal knowledge base and document hub — version-controlled, searchable, and accessible from anywhere
- Teams channels organized around projects and departments — not as a chat replacement for email, but as a true collaboration workspace
- Teams Rooms or Teams Phone replacing traditional phone systems at a fraction of the cost
- SharePoint news posts for internal communications instead of all-staff email chains
Power Automate: Eliminate Repetitive Work
Power Automate is included in most M365 business plans and it's one of the most underused features in the platform. It lets you automate repetitive workflows without writing code:
- Auto-save email attachments to SharePoint when they arrive from specific senders
- Send approval requests and track responses automatically
- Trigger notifications in Teams when a SharePoint list is updated
- Automate new employee onboarding document delivery
- Generate reports from Microsoft Forms data on a schedule
We've helped businesses save 10+ hours per week per team just by automating workflows they were doing manually. And it's already in their license.
Governance: The Unglamorous Work That Matters
As organizations grow, unconfigured M365 tenants develop serious governance problems: duplicate Teams, abandoned SharePoint sites, shared mailboxes with no owner, guest users who should have been removed months ago. Proper governance means setting policies that keep things organized as the organization grows.
This includes setting naming conventions for Teams and Groups, configuring external sharing policies, setting lifecycle management for M365 Groups, and reviewing guest access regularly. None of this is exciting — but it prevents the technical debt and security gaps that accumulate in unmanaged tenants.
Get an M365 Tenant Review
The best way to understand whether you're getting full value from your Microsoft 365 investment is a tenant review. We look at your current configuration, security posture, license utilization, and governance — and come back with a prioritized list of improvements. Most clients are surprised by how much capability they already have and aren't using.