Self-service Microsoft 365, without losing control

A move to Microsoft 365, built around self-service

The company moved to Microsoft 365 to give 1,200 employees one place to work, with licences spanning F1 to E5 so every role got the tools it needed. Self-service was the plan from the start: people would create and run their own workspaces without waiting on IT.

The migration itself went well. Email, documents and collaboration all landed in the cloud. Running that estate at scale turned out to be the harder half of the job.

What self-service produced at scale

A consultant reviewed the SharePoint architecture and the company reorganised its content along departmental lines. That exercise is what exposed the real problem. The freedom Microsoft 365 gave people had already produced more sites, teams and content than anyone could account for.

• Teams created faster than anyone could track them People created Teams for projects, social groups, short-lived initiatives and even one-off meetings. Each one silently added a SharePoint site and an Office 365 Group behind it, so the company's digital footprint grew far faster than the work being done in it.
• External sharing nobody could see Sharing content outside the company took two clicks and left no expiry behind it. With no way to see who held a link or what it reached, IT locked external sharing down completely and took the productivity hit that came with it.
• Compliance pressure Industry regulation and data protection law kept tightening, and the company needed to show that its use of Microsoft 365 held to both.

Six things that decided the trial

The IT team looked at several products before trialling Rencore Governance. It had to answer the immediate security questions and still be the tool the company ran its Microsoft 365 estate with in three years' time.

• Coverage across the whole estate Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Exchange, Entra ID, Viva Engage and the Power Platform in one place, which matched what the company actually had to control.
• Dashboards and policies from day one Pre-configured dashboards and policies, built on established practice, meant results in the first week rather than after a setup project.
• Insight at the level decisions get made Granular detail on user activity, external sharing and resource use across the estate was the clearest difference from the alternatives.
• Enforcement without a person in the loop Collecting the data, applying policy and remediating what breaks it, all without constant manual work, mattered to a stretched IT team.
• Room to fit the rules to the company The out-of-the-box policies were strong on their own, and rules and automation workflows could still be shaped around the company's own compliance requirements.
• Support that stayed close Through the trial, Rencore's team checked in regularly and answered questions quickly rather than waiting to be chased.

What changed after the rollout

The company rolled Rencore Governance out across the organisation after the trial, with Rencore's team guiding the implementation. Four changes showed up quickly.

• One view of the estate The IT team could see external sharing risk, track how Teams and SharePoint sites were created and used, and watch Power Platform activity from a single dashboard.
• Policy that enforces itself Rules now archive inactive Teams automatically after a set period, require approval before sensitive content goes outside the company, and hold naming conventions on new SharePoint sites.
• External sharing switched back on Unnecessary sharing links were identified and revoked, expiry policies went in, and IT could finally see which external users reached what. With those controls running, the company reinstated external sharing instead of leaving it blocked.
• Hours of manual work turned into minutes Work that used to take the IT team hours by hand now runs from one dashboard in minutes.

Where it went from there

• A more deliberate collaboration culture With clear rules written down and communicated to everyone, people thought twice before spinning up another team or sharing a file outside the company. The environment got tidier because behaviour changed, not because access was taken away.
• IT moved from reactive to proactive Day-to-day governance runs on its own, so the team spends its time on work that moves the company forward instead of clearing up after the estate.
• It scales with the business As the company grows, its policies and practices adapt with it, so the Microsoft 365 environment keeps pace rather than being rebuilt.
• Self-service, with guardrails Guardrails made it safe to give people more freedom to create and run their own collaboration spaces again. User satisfaction and adoption of the Microsoft 365 tools both went up.

Control and self-service in the same estate

The company kept the self-service Microsoft 365 it set out to build and gained the control to run it safely. Sprawl is managed, external sharing is open and monitored, and compliance sits inside daily operations rather than arriving as a periodic scramble. The IT team spends its time on what comes next.