Activate 365 recap: What you missed at the SharePoint Intelligence Summit

Most organisations already own a productivity platform powerful enough to transform how they work. They're just not using it properly.

That was the thread running through Activate 365. Across four sessions, we heard the same message: stop buying more tools, start activating what you already have.

Here's what stood out.

Keynote: From infrastructure to intelligence

The real cost of "good enough"

Microsoft provides the infrastructure. You have to create the intelligence.

SharePoint has evolved from document repository to the content layer underpinning Teams, Outlook and Copilot. But rolling out licenses and enabling features doesn't mean anyone's using them properly. Email remains everyone's system of record. SharePoint sits underutilised. Compliance stays reactive.

The new SharePoint agents can automate tasks and assist with information retrieval - but automation without governance just means you're automating chaos.

The goal isn't adding more features. It's surfacing information where people already work.

Session 1: Beyond the inbox

The $60 million email problem

Email isn't going anywhere. When you want to confirm something formally, you say "could you email that to me so I've got it for my records."

Arup built Ideagen Mail Manager because critical project information was trapped in individual inboxes. When disputes happened, they couldn't find what they needed. The tool transforms emails into a searchable database accessible by the whole team.

The problem hasn't gone away:

• 57% of professionals still use email as their main external communication
• The average professional spends five hours a day in their inbox
• 67% of compliance violations are due to inadequate email documentation
• The average construction dispute in North America is $60 million

One customer had to pull someone off a project for two weeks just to find a single email trail.

The issue isn't email - it's that it remains personal storage rather than organisational knowledge. When someone leaves or gets ill, that information goes with them.

As one Arup BIM specialist put it: "Most projects don't go wrong. But if they do, email becomes critical."

Session 2: Compliance by design

80% of SharePoint's compliance features sit dormant

Not because the features aren't there - because they haven't been activated for compliance.

If you have Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, you already own the infrastructure. What's missing is the activation - the workflows, governance and solutions that turn SharePoint from document storage into a compliance management system.

Four organisations showed what that looks like in practice:

Covestro unified policy management across global manufacturing sites. Each site was following corporate policies but operating independently - different naming conventions, different structures. Now they have enterprise-wide visibility while maintaining site-specific flexibility. Questions that took hours take seconds.

Adams Land and Cattle moved from reactive incident logging to proactive prevention. They introduced "cold eye reviews" - identifying potential problems before they escalate. Standardised root causes and corrective actions with owners and due dates mean they can spot patterns and act early.

Canada Lands Company centralised contract visibility. Contracts had been scattered across legal, IT and department heads - sometimes buried in email. Cost avoidance from catching unwanted auto-renewals paid for the implementation many times over.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina automated conflict of interest disclosures. Distribution lists maintain themselves through Active Directory integration. What took weeks now takes hours.

All four already had Microsoft 365. Each implementation took 45 to 60 days.

Session 3: The connected workplace

Breaking down Microsoft 365 silos

Microsoft 365 was designed as an integrated platform. So why does it still feel like disconnected apps?

People toggle between applications up to 1,200 times a day. That's up to four hours a week lost just refocusing - plus the hidden costs of duplicated work and errors. In local government, there's even a term for it: "IT frustration" - now recognised as genuine workplace stress.

The answer isn't another system. It's bringing SharePoint to where people already work.

A water utility in Western Australia implemented their document management system with proper permissions from the start - finance locked to finance, HR to HR. Now every user has Copilot and executives use it daily. They trust it because they trust the information it's searching.

Before: fire break inspections took rangers four to five months - paper forms, spreadsheets, scanning, filing.

After: photos and notes on a phone, emailed straight into the system. One month saved.

A legal team built their matter management on Microsoft 365. Within two minutes of a case landing, they have a site, permissions and can start filing. No context switching.

Make it easy for users to do the right thing and they will.

The bottom line

The gap between what Microsoft 365 can do and what most organisations get from it is significant. Closing it doesn't require year-long IT projects.

It requires activation.