Microsoft

Getting the Microsoft estate you already pay for into a state worth using — and ready for Copilot.

Engagement

Assessment + implementation. Assessment first. Remediation, migration and rollout are scoped from what it finds.

Who it is for

IT leaders, information managers, and the executives who have been told Copilot is ready to switch on.

When people call us

Copilot is on the agenda, a tenant has grown without governance, a migration is overdue, or an audit asked a question nobody could answer.

Most businesses own far more Microsoft than they use. The licences are bought, a fraction of the capability is switched on, and the gap is configuration, structure and ownership rather than product. That gap is cheap to ignore until an assistant is pointed at the estate, or an auditor asks who can see what.

Copilot does not create the problem, it publishes it

Nothing in a tenant becomes more exposed the day Copilot is enabled. What changes is that content which was always technically shared becomes trivially findable, by anyone, in natural language. Sites nobody has opened in four years, a payroll workbook in a Teams site with inherited permissions, the reorganisation deck in a folder shared with the whole company. This is why readiness work is not a formality, and why rollouts stall after the pilot.

Assessment first, and it is not a formality

The first engagement is a read on the estate: what is switched on, where content lives, how permissions actually resolve, what is stale, what is labelled, what is duplicated. It produces a remediation roadmap with the items in the order they should be done and what each one takes. Some of that work you will do yourselves, and we will say which parts.

Migration is when structure gets fixed, or set in concrete

A migration that copies a file share into SharePoint moves the mess and adds licensing. The point of moving is that it is the one moment when structure, metadata and permissions can be changed without asking people to reorganise their own work — so the information architecture comes before the migration tooling, not after it.

Work we have done

SharePoint audit for AI readiness — energy services and construction. The concerns were security and information risk, and there was no information architecture to implement against. We reviewed the estate, found a significant number of high-risk issues, and designed the information architecture along with the other remediation the estate needed. Our recommendation was to clean up and close the high-risk gaps before going near a rollout.

Copilot on the agenda and no clear read on the estate? Bring it to a briefing.

Estate readiness

Most tenants are on the first rung and being sold the fourth.

Copilot is sold against the top rung. The work that gets you there is the three below it, and skipping them is what turns a rollout into a pause.

01Accumulated
Sites created by whoever needed one, permissions broken to solve a Tuesday problem, no owner, no taxonomy, search nobody trusts.
02Assessed
What you own, what is exposed, what is stale and what is duplicated — with the risks in the order they would cost you.
03Remediated
Structure designed, oversharing closed, labels applied, retention mapped to something real.
04Governed and ready
Provisioning, ownership and review that hold — and an estate an assistant can be pointed at safely.

The practice

Tenant and estate assessment

What you own, what is switched on, what is exposed, and what is being paid for twice. The report names the risks in order of what they would cost you.

Information architecture and taxonomy

Site structure, hub design, content types, managed metadata and a term store people can actually use. Covered in depth under SharePoint.

Permissions and oversharing remediation

Broken inheritance, orphaned sites and everything shared with Everyone except external users — the single biggest reason Copilot rollouts get paused.

Purview deployment

Sensitivity labels, auto-labelling, DLP, retention and records, rolled out in phases rather than announced. Covered under Purview.

Copilot readiness

The permission, content and labelling work that has to be true before an assistant is pointed at your estate. Copilot surfaces what was always technically shared.

Migration

File shares, on-premises SharePoint, Google Workspace, Box and Dropbox, migrated into a structure that was designed rather than copied.

Agents in Copilot Studio

Agents built where your work already lives, grounded in content that has been cleaned up first. Covered under Copilot Studio.

Governance and lifecycle

Provisioning, ownership, review and archival, so the estate does not re-accumulate the year after it is fixed.

Adoption

Training built on the work each role actually does, because a tenant nobody changed their habits for is a licence cost with extra steps.

What you keep

The code and the data·Your existing relationships·Approval and control·The ability to stop·The off switchWhat that means

What we build on

The parts of the estate this covers.

Assessment first in every case. Remediation, migration and rollout are scoped from what it finds.

SharePoint Online: Information architecture, taxonomy, permissions, governance and migration. The practice.
Microsoft Purview: Sensitivity labels, auto-labelling, DLP, retention and records. The practice.
Copilot Studio: Agents grounded in a tenant that has been cleaned up first. The practice.
Microsoft 365 Copilot: The readiness work — permissions, labels, content currency — that decides whether a rollout is safe to run.
Power Platform: Power Automate and Power Apps for the workflow and the interfaces around all of it.
Teams and OneDrive: Where the sprawl usually starts, and where governance has to hold if it is going to hold anywhere.

Inside Microsoft

Start with a 45-minute briefing.

No pitch. We’ll map your situation against what actually works and tell you honestly where to start.

Book a briefing ↗