What is Microsoft 365
What is Microsoft 365?
If you ask a Large Language-Model (LLM), like Microsofts own Chat-GPT based Copilot, what Microsoft 365 is, you will probably get a reply akin to:
"Microsoft 365 is a subscription-based productivity suite designed to help individuals, businesses, and organizations work efficiently and collaboratively. It includes popular applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, along with cloud services like OneDrive for storage and Teams for communication. Microsoft 365 is packed with features to streamline work, such as AI-powered tools, real-time collaboration, and security options to protect your data. Plus, regular updates ensure you're always using the latest version."
That is a nice summary of what Microsoft used to call Office 365, and these days call Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise. Microsoft 365 is quite a lot more then that though, but keeping in mind that Microsoft has a very long track record of messing up the names for their products and services we should not be surprised if a LLM replies to any prompt containing "365" and "Microsoft" with highlighting the most popular tools used by information workers (Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, ...).
If I were to get the question I might respond with the single sentance: Microsoft 365 is Microsofts subscription-based offering for attempting to provide companies of all sizes with all the digital tools and services they need to conduct their daily work, securely and compliant and from anywhere.
Depending on who asked the question the follow-up information could continue close to indefinitely as Microsoft is continuously releasing new services under the Microsoft 365 umbrella, either by building them on their own or by purchasing competition and incorporate it. For business productivity, collaboration, planning and communication e.t.c. there is something for all types of companies, and if a certain business typical workload does not yet fit into the services you can assume that Microsoft is working on how to get it added. That the cloud competitor Amazon decided to abandon their internally built systems in favour of Microsoft 365 is a testament on how good it is.
A neat resource, that to my knowledge is not affiliated with Microsoft, for checking when to use what of the business focused services and applications in Microsoft 365 is (used to be at least, as of writing not loading) the Microsoft 365 Periodic Table: https://ems.jumpto365.com/
With these high ambitions of being suitable for all types of businesses the requirements on security and regulatory compliance are equally high, and I argue that Microsoft has successfully become the most compliant of all the major cloud vendors for both Azure and Microsoft 365. By purchasing Microsoft 365 you thus purchase the possibility to be regulatory compliant, but that does not mean you automatically are. You still have to configure and adapt your organization accordingly to become compliant and I recommend you contact your local specialists to do so if in doubt on how to do it.
Similar to compliance is security. Microsoft 365 has the security functionality needed for your information to be protected, but you need to configure it accordingly for your organization to be secure by using it.
Alright, enough of the general flattery. We get it. Microsoft 365 intends to be a complete digital package for any organization. Surely that then gets expensive? Well, since the needs are different depending on type of company and size, the variations in licensing offered by Microsoft vary a lot and has options for everyone. The licensing can be a bit overwhelming when trying to figure out the most cost-efficient setup for your organization, and Microsoft 365 licensing deserves a blog post of its own. From my experience as consultant in larger organizations, the underutilization of Microsoft 365 is however what results in unnecessary high IT costs as organizations often have overlapping functionality in multiple products and platforms, simply because they are unaware of what they actually get from the Microsoft 365 licenses they already have.
Managing Microsoft 365
Instead of listing each service and application you currently get out-of-the-box per each Microsoft 365 license bundle, and try to explain what each do, I will do a list of the administration centers used to configure and manage Microsoft 365 services and recommend at what company size I think you should pay attention to it. Hopefully this gives you an overview of what it can do for your organization.
| Admin Portal | Size | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 | Small | - Setup basic services - Create users, groups & Teams - Assign user licenses - New services without dedicated admin center - Manage Copilot - ... |
| Exchange Online | Small | - Email settings - ... |
| Entra ID (previously AAD) | Medium | - Manage users & groups - SSO & Conditional Access - External collaboration settings - ... |
| SharePoint Online | Medium | - Manage Sites - Configure OneDrive - Setup Intranet - ... |
| Universal Print | Medium | - Manage Printers - ... |
| Intune | Large | - Manage devices - Mobile phone enrollment policies - ... |
| Microsoft Defender | Large | - Security settings & operations - Microsoft Sentinel - ... |
| Teams | Large | - Teams settings - Meetings settings - ... |
| Office configuration | Large | - Office Cloud Update - Release channel settings for Office - ... |
| Power BI | Large | - Power BI settings - Premium capacity - ... |
| Power Automate | Large | - Manage Automation settings - Deploy solutions - ... |
| Search & intelligence | Large | - Manage data sources for search - Configure search - Connect external data - ... |
| Microsoft Purview | Enterprise | - Information Security & Protection - Data Governance - ... |
| Power Platform | Enterprise | - Power Platform settings - Manage Environments & Policies - ... |
| Viva Engage | Enterprise | - Previously known as Yammer - Configure settings and policies for user interactions in communities - ... |
What is the difference between Small, Medium, Large and Enterprise in above table? It does not really matter as other factors like type of company and area of business also plays into when to start using what in Microsoft 365. The point of the table is more to highlight the many areas being covered by Microsoft 365 and unless you are an Enterprise organization you do not have to pay attention to it all.
Superpowers of Microsoft 365
Wrapping up by touching something that absolutely deserves a blog post of its own. While there are several business focused services in Microsoft 365 that shine above the rest (many used to say SharePoint, several say Teams, a few says Planner and Project for the Web, and some are starting to say Loop) the true superpower of Microsoft 365 is, according to me, how it all connects and integrate with each other. The fact that it all shares the same Entra ID backbone for authentication (users and apps) and with the vision to get the Microsoft Graph API to be a "one API to rule them all" for everything Microsoft 365 and the Office Graph keeping track of connections between object across the services truly allows for some amazing stuff. I will hopefully write some more on this topic at another time..