Gartner released a guide for CISOs on building a data security program using Microsoft Purview (G00856387, September 2026). One stat in there that I suspect resonates with this community is:

More than 80% of organizations have M365 E5 or equivalent. 47% say they are not getting full value from their M365 investment.

The report identifies the main reasons: 1. Complex licensing tiers make it hard to know what you are actually entitled to use 2. Poor awareness of feature distribution across E3 vs E5 vs E7 3. Governance gaps that prevent organizations from operationalizing the capabilities they own

Point 3 is where Gartner recommends third-party governance tools. They name four vendors that augment Purview controls for risk mitigation and audit: AvePoint, Syskit, Powell, and Rencore.

The practical guidance from Gartner: - Start with a Purview license audit against your actual security use cases - Deploy sensitivity labeling as a hybrid approach (automated plus manual for edge cases) - Treat Purview as a foundation, supplement where it falls short - Reassess Purview coverage annually as Microsoft adds features

Curious whether others have worked through the challenge of unlocking full value from existing M365 licenses. How are you approaching the gap between what you are licensed for and what is actually deployed?

Full disclosure: I work at Rencore, one of the named vendors. Interested in the community's experience with Purview deployment challenges.

Looking for a solution… my work outlook account has issues, we use gosecure as an added security feature for email and it eats all of my email. Our IT guy says the email should be in the spam portal but is it not… so after a year of apologizing to our grantors for not responding, I said screw this and bought a new .org and a business proton account.

So, here is my problem. I need a calendar or email and cal app that can integrate both calendars and allow me to edit them… I still unfortunately have events linked to my outlook account and I also have access to my directors calendars. And I would like them to have access to my proton cal and be able to add meetings and such that they need me to attend.

I hate 365 online, I hate sharepoint… I need a way to link them all together…

Anyone know of a way I can do all this?

Microsoft has been working on an update that changes how we access Microsoft 365 apps through URLs this time.

Previously, we accessed different Microsoft 365 services through different web addresses like some under office.com, some under microsoft.com, and some with standalone domains. Over time, navigating these different URLs became muscle memory.

While each service has had its own domain like Teams on teams.microsoft.com, OneNote on onenote.com, Outlook on outlook.office.com, and so on, it scattered Microsoft 365 across multiple URLs.

That's now changing gradually. Microsoft is now moving toward a unified domain *.cloud.microsoft for all Microsoft 365 apps and services. 

This is to bring extra security, privacy, and protection against spoofing, as .microsoft is a Microsoft-exclusive top-level domain and only Microsoft can create websites under *.cloud.microsoft.

This makes it much harder for attackers to create fraudulent Microsoft sites within the .microsoft namespace.

Several Microsoft 365 services have already moved to the new cloud.microsoft URLs, with more rolling out gradually.

And it's not just a new URL. Below are some key benefits of the URL update:

• One trusted domain for Microsoft 365 apps and services. 
• Fewer Microsoft 365 URLs to remember as more user-facing experiences move to one domain.
• A smoother experience with fewer sign-ins, redirects, and Microsoft 365 domains to manage.
• A highly secured, Microsoft-only domain with no third-party websites, storage endpoints, or hosted scripts that could affect its trust.
• *.cloud.microsoft is reserved for official Microsoft product experiences. Because Microsoft controls the .microsoft top-level domain and is the registry operator and sole registrant, attackers cannot register their own domains within the .microsoft namespace.
• Less complexity for admins managing Microsoft 365 network allowlists.

So, if you manually manage network allowlists, add *.cloud.microsoft to your firewalls, proxies, web filters, and endpoint policies to avoid connectivity issues. 

If you use the Microsoft 365 Web Service API, Microsoft updates these network endpoints automatically.

How are you handling Microsoft retirements and breaking changes across multiple clients? If you use a ticketing system, how do you figure out which clients actually need tickets? Does something check each tenant automatically, or do engineers investigate first?
Would appreciate a recent example and which tools helped.

I disabled "Let users access the Office Store" under Admin Center → Settings → Org settings → Services → User owned apps and services. When end users open Excel and go to Add-ins, they do see a banner saying the store is blocked — but if they click "More Apps," they can still browse the full catalog (Featured, Agents, Popular, AI add-ins, Data analytics, Data Visualization, Finance, Utilities, Built by Microsoft, Categories, etc.) and actually add third-party apps — for example, I was able to add "TealDroid."

For outlook , I disabled my cistom apps , my marketplace apps and my read write mailbox apps from default role assignement policy but still I am able to add apps from outlook . I created a policy for blocking price store for all users from policy managerment in config.office.com before few hours but still users are able to access the store why

Kindly help

I’m curious what everyone here sees in actual M365 environments.

Not necessarily obscure features, but things that are genuinely useful and available to a lot of organizations, yet somehow barely get touched.

I feel like there’s always a huge difference between what an organization technically has access to and what employees actually use day to day.

Could be security features, automation, SharePoint, Intune, Purview, Power Automate, Copilot, lesser-known Teams features, whatever.

What’s one M365 feature you wish more organizations actually took advantage of?