Almost every business we support runs on Microsoft 365, and almost none of them use what they already pay for. This is our honest review of the eight parts of the stack we deploy and manage most often, written from live migrations rather than a datasheet.
One theme runs through all of it, so we will say it once at the top: the licence is not the control. The configuration is. The single most common finding when we take over a tenant is that the capability was already bought and never turned on.
Microsoft 365 Business Premium: six years on
Microsoft folded security into the SMB licence in 2020, and Business Premium has been our default recommendation ever since. Apps, Teams, OneDrive, plus Intune, conditional access and Defender, in one licence, properly priced.
The catch, six years in: most tenants we inherit run Premium with the security switched off. Deployed properly, it is the best value in business software.
Verdict: the default for almost every business under 300 seats. Buy it, then actually turn it on.
Exchange Online: email nobody thinks about
We ran on-premises Exchange for years: the patching, the storage, the 2am restores. Exchange Online ended all of it, and a decade of fleet experience says deliverability and uptime have been close to boring.
Boring is the compliment. The work that remains is security posture. Anti-spoofing records, transport rules and mailbox auditing still arrive half-configured on every tenant we inherit.
Verdict: the easiest migration case in the catalogue, finished by tightening what Microsoft leaves loose.
SharePoint Online: fifteen years on
We have migrated file servers into SharePoint Online for over a decade. Done well, it ends the office file server: versioned, searchable, shareable by link, available anywhere.
Done badly, it is the same mess with a browser. The condition is information architecture: structure, permissions and sharing defaults designed before migration, not patched after.
Verdict: the right home for business documents, if you respect the setup.
OneDrive known-folder backup
Known Folder Move arrived in 2018: Desktop and Documents silently synced to the cloud. Unglamorous, and it has saved more client data than any product we run. Stolen laptops, dead drives, ransomware, and the files were already somewhere else.
The criticism is sync conflicts on shared machines and the occasional user who fills their quota with personal video. Both manageable.
Verdict: turn it on everywhere, by policy, before you need it.
Microsoft Teams: nine years in
Teams shipped in 2017 as a Slack response and became the operating room of most businesses we support: chat, meetings, calling, files, all of it.
Nine years on, the honest critique is sprawl. Unmanaged, every project spawns a team, every team sprawls files, and nobody can find anything. Structure and lifecycle policies are not optional at scale.
Verdict: indispensable, and best run with deliberate governance from day one.
Teams Rooms: the meeting room, fixed
Teams Rooms hardware has matured to the point where the meeting room demo is just true: walk in, one touch, you are in the meeting, and the people at home can actually hear you.
The failures we see are almost always non-standard: consumer TVs, oddball cameras, DIY cabling. Certified kit, properly deployed, just runs, and reports its own health back to us.
Verdict: standardise on certified hardware and the meeting room stops being an IT ticket.
Copilot for Microsoft 365: year three
Copilot went GA in late 2023, and we have now run it long enough to separate hype from habit. Where it sticks: meeting summaries, first drafts, digging answers out of your own documents. Where it does not: anywhere people expected it to do the thinking.
The unglamorous prerequisite is data hygiene. Copilot reads what your permissions let it read, so oversharing surfaces fast. Fix sharing first. We insist on it.
Verdict: real, measurable usefulness for the right roles, after the groundwork.
Purview: compliance you can switch on
Purview, Microsoft's compliance layer, went from enterprise luxury to practical answer: retention policies, sensitivity labels, audit logs and DLP that satisfy the questions insurers and auditors actually ask.
The honesty: it is deep, the licensing maps to E5 or add-ons, and a label scheme nobody understands is worse than none. Start small, label what matters, expand.
Verdict: the compliance evidence machine, deployed in slices rather than all at once.
What we would tell you
If you buy one thing, buy Business Premium and configure it. If you fix one thing this quarter, fix SharePoint and Teams sharing defaults, because that is the prerequisite for Copilot being safe and the reason most Copilot pilots stall. If you turn on one thing today, turn on OneDrive known-folder backup, because it is free with what you already own and it is the control that has saved the most client data for us.
Purview is worth a conversation only once the first three are done. Compliance evidence built on an untidy tenant documents the untidiness.
Reviewed from live fleet experience · published August 2026 · we earn a fair margin on some products we supply; reviews are not sponsored.
