M365 Beyond Email: Tools You Are Probably Not Using
Most companies use only 20% of what their Microsoft 365 license includes. Discover the tools that can transform your productivity at no additional cost.
When we ask users what they use in Microsoft 365, the answer is almost always the same: Outlook, Teams, and Word. Yet your license includes dozens of tools that can automate processes, improve collaboration, and reduce third-party software costs.
The 20% problem
M365 adoption studies show that organizations use less than 25% of the capabilities included in their subscription. They are paying for tools they do not use, while buying additional software to cover needs that M365 already addresses.
Tools you probably have and are not taking advantage of
Power Automate: no-code automation
Included in M365 Business Basic and above. It lets you create automated workflows across applications without writing a single line of code.
Immediate use cases: automatically saving email attachments to SharePoint, approving vacation requests directly from Teams, or syncing Forms responses with Excel in OneDrive.
Microsoft Forms: professional surveys and forms
It fully replaces Google Forms and SurveyMonkey for corporate use cases. Results are analyzed in real time and exported to Excel with one click.
Planner and To Do: integrated task management
Many companies pay for Trello, Asana, or Monday.com when Planner offers equivalent functionality for small and midsize teams, built right into Teams.
Viva Insights: well-being and productivity
It analyzes work patterns without accessing email content and generates personalized recommendations: focus time, excessive meetings, collaboration outside business hours.
SharePoint Online: corporate intranet
Beyond file storage, SharePoint lets you build a complete corporate intranet with news, employee directories, knowledge bases, and department portals.
The path to real adoption
Having the tools is not enough. Adoption requires an assessment of current usage, identification of use cases specific to your company, targeted training, and internal champions who promote usage within their teams.
At Barona Enterprise, we support this process with our M365 adoption service. The typical result is a 30-40% reduction in third-party tools and a measurable increase in team productivity.
