Maximising Out Of The Box - Getting the most out of features in Microsoft 365

Deeper Dive 7/9: Maximising Out Of The Box - Getting the most out of features in Microsoft 365

If your organisation isn’t constantly seeking ways to enhance efficiency and productivity it’s going to fall behind. One of the most effective strategies you can implement is to consolidate your technology stack and leverage built-in features of Microsoft 365. You can unlock even further value by enhancing the out-of-the-box (OOTB) functionalities to make them work smarter.

However, this presents a challenge. Enterprise software is becoming increasingly feature-rich. Despite an abundance of features, they often lack cohesion, leaving organisations struggling to understand how best to utilise what they have and when they might need to extend it. This is where we come in. Our role is to simplify the complex, helping organisations navigate and get value from built-in tools.

Maximising OOTB value not only improves efficiency but also enhances overall productivity.

A January 2025 report by Forrester estimated end-user productivity savings of more than 70 hours per year by combining the communication and collaboration features of Microsoft Teams with the collaboration and document sharing capabilities of Microsoft 365 apps, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online.  

Here are my top 6 tips for maximising your productivity and your investment in Microsoft 365:

1. Embrace collaboration tools: Features like shared document libraries, co-authoring, and real-time communication make it possible for teams to collaborate anytime and anywhere. Organisations frequently overlook these opportunities. By highlighting their own success stories across the organisation, they can encourage more effective ways of working.

2. Consolidate and customise your user experience: Personalising intranets, team workspaces and channels enhance the user experience, making it more intuitive. This boosts user adoption by making it easy for people to find and use the tools and resources they need. Support this with good quality training and quick guides. A simple ‘what goes where’ infographic when consolidating your tech landscape makes this easy for end users.

3. Adopt a “single pane of glass” approach: Create a unified interface that consolidates various tools, data, and actions into one cohesive view. This approach enhances user experience by providing a streamlined and intuitive way to access and manage information across different systems. A single search experience across connected platforms is a massive win for productivity. Provide in page help and assistance to guide users on how to best use advanced search queries and filtering.

4. Leverage automated metadata: iWorkplace’s taxonomy and automated metadata application by structural hierarchy, enhances productivity ensuring users know where to file content and can quickly access it again. By automating labels and security we can also ensure sensitive or confidential files are kept out of reach.  

5. Make the right thing to do easy: By setting content governance defaults during creation or using an automation tool like iWorkplace, you can implement governance by stealth. Collaborate with tools users love, while ‘set and step back’ compliance makes content management easy. This is a key outcome many organisations are looking for when considering AI agent use in their organisations. A well-structured and relevant content source ultimately provides better grounding.

6. Ensure data security and compliance: Use built-in features such as Purview, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), and sensitivity labels  to protect sensitive information across your entire M365 tech landscape, prevent data accidents, and mitigate risks. Adding additional iWorkplace tools like Smart Records and Smart Labels empowers business user to tame content governance, strengthen security and automate retention and disposal, making compliance a breeze.

We help customers maximise OOTB by providing a range of iWorkplace methodology and apps that extend SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams in M365. This approach delivers better digital workplace solutions, effective compliance and governance, training and adoption programmes that work, deep technical expertise and customised solutions. But the real kicker is we really care. We want our customers to be able to best leverage Microsoft tools to their full potential. With our help, organisations can easily navigate complexities and unlock their full potential, ultimately driving better business outcomes.

Are you interested in doing more with less in your M365 environment? Reach out to our team today.