Microsoft 365 is the most widely deployed business productivity platform in New Zealand. It is also, for most organisations, significantly underutilised. The majority of businesses are using email, maybe Teams for messaging, and SharePoint as a basic file store. The platform is capable of significantly more — and the licences are often already paid for.
What Most Businesses Miss
The gap between what organisations pay for and what they actually use is substantial. Microsoft 365 Business Premium includes enterprise-grade endpoint management through Intune, advanced threat protection through Defender, information governance tools, Power Platform for workflow automation, and a range of collaboration capabilities that most businesses have never configured.
The reason these capabilities go unused is almost always the same: the initial deployment focused on getting email working and migrating existing files, and no one has revisited the configuration since. The platform was set up to be functional, not optimised.
High-Value Areas Worth Addressing
Endpoint Management (Intune). If your staff devices are not enrolled in Intune, you have no centralised visibility or control over what is on those machines, whether security policies are applied, or what happens to company data if a device is lost or an employee leaves. Intune deployment is included in most Microsoft 365 Business licences.
SharePoint and Teams Structure. Most organisations migrate to SharePoint and recreate the same folder structure that existed on their file server. This misses the point. SharePoint and Teams are designed for structured collaboration — permission management, version control, and external sharing that can be done securely.
Power Automate. Repetitive manual processes — approval workflows, data entry, report distribution — can often be automated using Power Automate without custom development. Most Microsoft 365 Business licences include Power Automate, and the savings in staff time frequently justify a proper review of what can be automated.
The Right Approach
Optimising a Microsoft 365 environment is not a one-time project. It is an ongoing process of identifying where the platform can better support how people work, and then configuring it properly. Starting with a structured assessment of current usage and configuration gives you a clear picture of where the highest-value improvements are.