For a lot of businesses, Microsoft 365 means Outlook, Word, Excel and perhaps Teams.
That's understandable. They're the applications people see every day.
But depending on your Microsoft 365 subscription, you're probably paying for considerably more than that.
Microsoft's current business plans include a collection of additional applications and cloud services alongside the familiar Office products. Even Business Basic includes services such as Bookings, Planner and Forms, as well as OneDrive and SharePoint.
That doesn't mean you should immediately start using all of them.
In fact, we'd recommend the opposite.
Don't introduce another tool unless it solves a problem.
But before paying for another subscription, it's worth knowing what you already have.
Here are ten Microsoft 365 capabilities that small businesses can easily overlook.
1. Microsoft Bookings: let customers book time without the email tennis
If customers, prospects or other people regularly need to arrange time with you, Microsoft Bookings can provide an online booking page.
You can define appointment types, availability, duration and who can be booked, allowing somebody to choose an appropriate time without the usual exchange of emails.
For businesses offering consultations, introductory calls or customer appointments, that can remove a surprisingly repetitive piece of administration.
The booking page can be linked from or incorporated into a website so the journey feels like part of the wider business.
Fairbourne uses online booking for exactly this reason: people who want to talk to us can choose an available time themselves rather than waiting for an email exchange.
If you're already paying separately for a scheduling platform, Bookings may be worth investigating.
That doesn't automatically mean it is better than a specialist product such as Calendly. The specialist product may suit your requirements better.
The useful question is:
Are you paying separately for something Microsoft 365 could already do well enough?
2. Microsoft Planner: a simple way to organise work
Not every business needs a large project-management platform.
Sometimes you simply need a clear view of what needs doing, who owns it, when it is due and what stage it has reached.
Microsoft Planner provides task boards that can work well for that kind of requirement.
Fairbourne uses Planner to track work across the business because it sits in a useful middle ground between trying to remember everything or scattering actions across notes, and introducing a much larger project-management system.
The same approach could be useful for customer onboarding, a website project, operational tasks, an office move or recurring business processes.
The important thing isn't the tool itself.
It's having a reliable answer to: what needs doing, who owns it and what happens next?
3. Microsoft Forms: collect information without another forms platform
Microsoft Forms can create straightforward forms, questionnaires and surveys.
That might include customer feedback, an internal request form, a staff survey, onboarding information, equipment requests or simple information collection.
On its own, that's useful.
It becomes more interesting when the information collected starts another process.
A submitted form might trigger an acknowledgement, notify somebody, create a task or feed information into another business process.
That is where relatively simple Microsoft 365 tools can start working together.
4. SharePoint: somewhere for the company's files
SharePoint can sound like a large corporate intranet product.
For a small business, one of its most useful roles can be much simpler: providing a structured home for shared company files.
A useful distinction is:
OneDrive is primarily for someone's files. SharePoint is for the organisation's shared information.
If business documents are sitting on a local network drive, individual computers or a growing collection of folders in different cloud services, SharePoint can provide shared document libraries that are accessible across appropriate devices and locations.
It also supports collaboration, version history and controlled access.
The goal isn't to make file storage more complicated.
It's to make business information less dependent on a particular computer, folder or person.
5. OneDrive: more than somewhere to put a few files
OneDrive gives each licensed user cloud storage associated with their Microsoft 365 account.
For many Microsoft 365 business plans, Microsoft currently provides substantial per-user storage, but entitlements can change and should be checked against the current plan (opens in a new tab).
OneDrive can synchronise files across devices and make replacing or changing computers considerably easier.
But it is worth being deliberate about what belongs there.
An individual's working document may make perfect sense in OneDrive.
Information that belongs to the business and needs to remain available regardless of who created it may be better placed in SharePoint.
That simple distinction can prevent a lot of confusion later.
6. Shared mailboxes: stop important company email belonging to one person
Addresses such as info@, accounts@, sales@ and enquiries@ represent a business function rather than an individual person.
Microsoft 365 shared mailboxes can allow appropriate users to access and respond from those addresses without treating the mailbox as somebody's personal account.
That makes it easier for more than one person to handle an enquiry and reduces the risk of important business correspondence disappearing into one employee's inbox.
It can also make staff changes easier to manage because the company address isn't tied to the person who happened to use it first.
7. Microsoft Lists: turn the spreadsheet that's becoming a system into something more appropriate
Spreadsheets are incredibly useful.
They're also very good at gradually becoming systems they were never intended to be.
If a file has reached the point where it resembles Tracker-v7-FINAL.xlsx and several people are using it to manage an ongoing business process, Microsoft Lists may be worth a look.
Lists can hold structured information such as assets, issues, suppliers, requests, contacts and status trackers.
You can define columns, create different views, filter information and connect the list to wider Microsoft 365 processes.
It isn't a replacement for every spreadsheet, database or CRM.
But it can be a useful step between an increasingly complicated spreadsheet and buying or building a dedicated system.
8. Power Automate: connect the steps people are doing manually
Many business processes contain small manual hand-offs.
A form is submitted. Somebody sends an email. A record is created. A task is assigned. A document is moved. Somebody asks for approval.
Power Automate can connect many of those steps.
For example: form submitted → notification sent → record created → task assigned
or: approval received → document moved → confirmation email sent
This doesn't always need AI.
If a predictable rule can handle the process, conventional automation may be simpler, cheaper and more reliable.
Power Automate can become considerably more sophisticated, and licensing can become more complicated as requirements grow, but there are useful opportunities well before reaching that point.
9. Microsoft Lists, Forms, Planner and Power Automate can work together
This one is slightly cheating because we've already mentioned the individual products.
But the combination is more interesting than any one of them on its own.
Imagine a simple internal request process.
A person submits a Microsoft Form. The information is added to a List. Power Automate notifies the appropriate person. A Planner task is created. The status can then be tracked.
That is a small business workflow built from tools that may already sit within the Microsoft environment.
It doesn't mean every business process should be built this way.
But it demonstrates why looking at the platform as a collection of connected capabilities can be more useful than thinking of Microsoft 365 as “email and Office”.
10. The security and identity capabilities behind the applications
Some of the most valuable Microsoft 365 capabilities aren't applications people open every day.
They're the controls behind them.
Microsoft 365 provides identity, accounts, permissions and multi-factor authentication, while plans such as Business Premium add more advanced capabilities around device management, identity and access, threat protection and information security.
Those capabilities become increasingly important as the business grows.
Questions such as these start to matter: What should this person have access to? What happens when somebody leaves? What happens if a laptop is lost? Should company information be accessible from any device? What happens if an account is compromised?
The technology doesn't answer those questions for you.
But the right Microsoft 365 environment can give the business better tools for implementing the answers.
The real opportunity isn't using more Microsoft products
It would be easy to finish this article by suggesting you should now go and switch on all ten things.
Please don't.
If your existing booking platform works brilliantly, keep it.
If your current project-management system suits the business, there may be no reason to replace it with Planner.
If a spreadsheet genuinely does the job, it can remain a spreadsheet.
The useful questions are:
- Could something we already have solve this problem?
- Would it solve it well enough?
- What would we gain from a specialist alternative?
- What would changing cost us?
Sometimes Microsoft 365 will be the answer.
Sometimes it won't.
So, are you getting everything you could from Microsoft 365?
Possibly not.
That's normal.
Microsoft 365 is a large platform and most businesses don't need to use every part of it.
But there may be opportunities to simplify your technology, reduce duplicate subscriptions, manage information better or automate pieces of work that are currently being handled manually.
The aim isn't to squeeze every possible feature out of the subscription. It's to identify the parts that can genuinely make the business work better.
For the latest plan inclusions and product details, check Microsoft's current Microsoft 365 business plan information (opens in a new tab).
Wondering what you're already paying for?
Fairbourne can help you review your existing Microsoft 365 environment, understand what you're licensed for and identify where the tools you already have could solve real business problems.
That could mean improving how you manage files, introducing online booking, organising work in Planner, simplifying an existing process, automating repetitive tasks or deciding that the tools you're already using are actually the better option.
And where there's a worthwhile opportunity, we can help take it from idea and analysis through configuration, implementation and adoption.