Microsoft Teams Is Just the Start — What Else Your M365 Collaboration Tools Can Do
- Daniel Brown
- Mar 24
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 29
Every business we work with uses Teams. Chat, video calls, maybe file sharing. Job done, right?
Not quite. Teams is the front door, but there's a whole building behind it that most people never walk through.
SharePoint — your actual file system
When you share a file in a Teams channel, it doesn't live in Teams. It lives in SharePoint. Every Teams channel has a SharePoint site behind it. That matters because SharePoint has proper document management — versioning, permissions, metadata, search.
Most businesses don't realise this. They dump files into Teams channels and end up with the same mess they had on the old network drive, just in a different place.
Set up SharePoint properly — with a clear site structure, consistent naming, and sensible permissions — and Teams becomes genuinely useful for document collaboration. Without that, it's just a chat app with a file dump attached.
Loop — collaborative notes that live everywhere
Loop is Microsoft's answer to Notion. It lets you create pages and components (tables, task lists, checklists) that can be embedded in Teams chats, Outlook emails, and other Loop pages. Edit it in one place, it updates everywhere.
Useful for meeting notes, project tracking, and anything where multiple people need to contribute to the same document without emailing versions back and forth.
Included in Business Standard and above.
Planner — task management without the overhead
If you're using sticky notes, spreadsheets, or your email inbox to track tasks, Planner is worth a look. Kanban boards, task assignments, due dates, priority flags. It integrates directly into Teams — you can add a Planner tab to any channel.
It's not Monday.com or Asana. It's simpler. For most small businesses, that's exactly what you want.
Included in every M365 plan.
Bookings — let clients book time with your team
An online booking page where clients or external contacts can book meetings with specific team members. It checks your Outlook calendar for availability, sends confirmations, and handles reminders.
If your team spends time going back and forth on "when are you free?", Bookings sorts that out. Set it up once, share the link, done.
Included in Business Standard and above.
Forms — surveys and data collection
Quick surveys, feedback forms, quizzes, event registrations. Results go straight into Excel. You can embed Forms in Teams, SharePoint, or send a link.
Simple but surprisingly useful. We see clients use it for everything from internal IT requests to client satisfaction surveys.
Included in every M365 plan.
How it all connects
The value isn't in any single tool — it's in how they connect. A client books a meeting via Bookings, it appears in your Outlook calendar, you take notes in Loop during the meeting, the notes sync to the Teams channel, action items go into Planner, related documents live in SharePoint.
No third-party tools. No extra cost. It's all in your M365 licence.
The catch is that someone needs to set it up properly and show your team how to use it. That's where we come in.
