Powers of Microsoft 365

Before I reveal what I consider be the stuff that makes Microsoft 365 powerful beyond what the competition delivers, let's list the services and applications that makes it into the productivity, collaboration and communications suite it is most known for.

Product/Service/Application	What for
Outlook	Email+more
Word	Word processing..
Excel	Spreadsheets..
PowerPoint	Presentations..
OneDrive	Sync your files to your personal SharePoint Site. Default storage location for several other services.
SharePoint	Intranet Communication Sites Collaboration Sites Records Management Lists Document Libraries backend for many other services Share and manage content, knowledge, and applications to empower teamwork. Highly customizable
Teams	Meet, share and chat plus more ...
OneNote	Digital notebooks
Forms	Surveys, quizzes and questionaires
Calendar	Manage and share your schedule
Sway	Interactive reports, presentations and mini-sites
Stream	Share videos of classes, meetings, presentations, and training sessions. Youtube for the company.
Visio	Visualize information
To Do	List and manage your tasks
Project	Develop project plans, assign tasks, track progress, and manage budgets.
Bookings	Simplify how you schedule and manage appointments both inside and outside your organization.
Whiteboard	Ideate and collaborate on a freeform canvas designed for pen, touch and keyboard.
Lists	Allows users to create, share, and track data inside lists. Nice packaging on-top of SharePoint Lists
Planner	Create plans, organize and assign tasks, share files, and get progress updates.
Clipchamp	Make and edit videos.
Loop	Enabling teams to think, plan, and create together.
Power BI	Data dashboards and reports
Power Automate	Simplify work by automation. Modern connector-based workflow engine.
Power Pages	Unleash the power of Copilot to craft secure, low-code business websites with ease.
Power Apps	Build mobile and web apps with the data your organization already uses.
Viva Connections	Access personalized tools, news, and resources.
Viva Insights	Improve your productivity and wellbeing. Can aggregate data for usefull insights to your HR team.
Viva Engage	Connect with coworkers, share information in communities, and organize around projects. Used to be called Yammer
Viva Learning	Curate and surface learning and training material to your users.
Copilot	Get things done using prompts and agents, all grounded in your content.

Yes, there are even more than the above, like all the stuff in Dynamics 365, Microsoft Fabric and Kaizala (is someone really using Kaizala in a manner providing value?) but surely this is enough to show the many areas the business focused services of Microsoft 365 cover.

None of these apps and services are however a Superpower of its own, but together they are one due to the interoperability of most of the services. The fact they share the same authentication, the same permissions, access and app models, the same search index, the Microsoft Graph keeping track of user actions and their information and the Microsoft Graph API being a single endpoint for almost all of them, allows for seamless work across apps and services to be possible. It is also why Copilot for Microsoft 365 can be grounded so well on your organization data and safely and securely operate isolated to only the data the user has access to.

The second Superpower of Microsoft 365 is its extensibility. While the out-of-the-box interoperability allows for scenarios where an idea might start in an Exchange Online inbox or Teams Chat or a user OneDrive and then via a Teams Meeting get added to a Loop Workspace with brainstorming refined by Copilot resulting in project plan in Project with multiple Planner Plans and SharePoint Lists for tracking detailed execution, with reporting and analytics by Power BI on top, the extensibility models in Microsoft 365 allows streamlining your processes and work even further. The different alternatives for extending Mictosoft 365 to perfectly fit your needs can generally be categorized as either:

1. User-driven self-service - Built by your users on their own initiative using for example Power Platform (Power Apps + Power Automate + Power BI), custom SharePoint Lists and Libraries, or Copilot Studio.
2. Developer maintained - Managed by developers in your organization, from IT or embedded in your business, using for example SharePoint Framework (SPFx) and the Teams and SharePoint app models, or Office Add-ins, or Power Platform, and why not the multitude of Azure components and services that beautifully blend with the Microsoft Graph API.
3. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) provided - Buy it instead of building it. There are app models with App Stores for ISV:s to publish solutions to for the major components of Microsoft 365.

There are benefits and risks involved with all three options for extending Microsoft 365 to fit your needs, but detailing that is worthy of a post of its own.

The 3rd and last Superpower I have selected is Entra ID (previously better known as Azure Active Directory) and the Security possibilities that come with it. Entra ID is the largest Identity Provider (IdP) and Identity Token Issuer (IdP) in the world that handles most authentication requests per time unit of them all. While you can use Entra ID without Microsoft 365 you cannot use Microsoft 365 without Entra ID, and while Microsoft has over the years branded their security solutions as sometimes part of Microsoft 365 and sometimes not, with an overlap of where-to-do-what in the different administration centers, they all depend on Entra ID in the backend. The fact you have users, devices, app registrations and the groups and access policies all in the same registry, with a shared audit and activity log, does allow for Security & Compliance possibilities that is not possible with systems spread out over multiple vendors (especially so if they cannot even use Entra ID for authentication).

My 3 chosen Superpowers of Microsoft 365 are thus:

• Interoperability
• Extensibility
• Entra ID & Security & Compliance