What I actually do with Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 is the operating system for most UK SMBs now. The problem is that the licence comes switched on and the configuration mostly doesn’t. A typical first audit finds: weak or missing MFA, default Exchange settings, sharing wide open, SharePoint sites scattered without governance, and a Teams setup that nobody’s been responsible for. The capability is paid for; it just hasn’t been turned into anything useful.
My job is to fix that, to take a Microsoft 365 tenant and configure it for how your business actually works. Sometimes that means a clean rebuild from defaults. Sometimes it’s a more careful tightening because there’s already a year of email and SharePoint content sitting on top of it. Either way, the goal is the same: a tenant where security is properly set up, the document architecture matches the way the work flows, and the day-to-day admin is being kept on top of by someone who actually knows the platform.
SharePoint as a serious platform, not a glorified shared drive
The biggest unused asset in most SMB Microsoft 365 tenants is SharePoint. Most businesses use it as a slightly-fancier file server, a single document library, no metadata, no governance, permissions built up by accident. It mostly works, but it’s nothing like what SharePoint can do.
Done properly, SharePoint becomes a genuine document and workflow platform: structured sites for each part of the business, document libraries with the metadata that matters, lists that replace the spreadsheets that nobody quite trusts anymore, and Power Automate workflows that handle the small approvals and notifications that used to clog up email.
A real example: I built a CRM on SharePoint for a law firm. Incoming leads land in a SharePoint list, automatically routed to the right team. Power Automate notifies the relevant Teams channel when a new lead arrives and notifies management if no action is taken inside the SLA. A Power App on top gives management an at-a-glance view of all open deals across all teams. The whole thing sits inside the M365 licences they were already paying for. No extra subscription, no extra integration, no extra system to maintain.
That’s the kind of work SharePoint is built for, and the kind of work most businesses don’t realise they have access to until someone shows them.
Teams, automation, and migrations
Beyond SharePoint, the other big M365 levers most SMBs underuse are Teams (treated as a chat tool when it can be the central communications platform with voice integration, proper channels, and document collaboration baked in) and Power Automate (treated as a developer tool when it can replace half the small workflows that currently live in email threads).
For migrations, Google Workspace to M365, on-premises Exchange to Exchange Online, legacy file servers to SharePoint, the technical work is mostly well-trodden ground. The real work is in cutover planning, communicating clearly with users, and making sure the things people actually rely on don’t disappear in the move. I plan migrations as projects, with milestones and explicit user comms, because a botched migration is the kind of mistake businesses remember for years.