At the beginning of this year, many of our roadmap discussions began with customer conversations about familiar topics: governance, automation, branding, intranet experiences, and adoption. Like before, they appeared to be separate conversations, often owned by different stakeholders and solved through different tools.
But the more customer discussions we had, the less separate these topics seemed. What initially appeared to be isolated concerns often turned out to be different signals coming from the same environment.
Take a workspace with no clear owner. It becomes harder to govern and maintain, eventually loses relevance to the people who depend on it, and exposes information to those who no longer need it. That's several issues with one root cause.
This analysis led us to a broader observation: that most organisations can identify individual issues, but don't have the full picture. They cannot see whether their Microsoft 365 environment is becoming more sustainable overall, or gradually accumulating risk, inefficiency and inconsistency over time.
Much of our product development in the first half of 2026 was shaped by this observation, and by the belief that once issues are identified, the next challenge is knowing how to course-correct. So we got to work.
The integrity of Microsoft 365
As we explored these broader challenges, we kept returning to the same idea: a digital workplace cannot be understood through individual reports, settings or initiatives alone. What matters is how all those elements come together over time.
That led us to define what we call Workspace Integrity: an organisation's ability to maintain a Microsoft 365 environment that remains structurally sound, operationally effective and experientially valuable as it evolves.
Those three dimensions are closely connected. Decisions about ownership influence governance. Governance influences trust. Trust influences adoption. What look like isolated issues often have consequences that extend far beyond where they first surface.
Once we started looking at Microsoft 365 through that lens, a question emerged: if integrity matters, how can organisations understand and improve it?
Measuring Workspace Integrity
This thinking informed the introduction of the Integrity Score and Integrity Recommendations. The score measures the factors that influence Workspace Integrity, while recommendations help organisations prioritise the actions most likely to improve it.
The score was never intended to be static. Microsoft 365 changes constantly, and so do customer priorities. The retirement of SharePoint Alerts, for example, justified new measurements this year, and branding governance and Copilot adoption are now creating new areas worth evaluating. What matters is less the individual metrics and more the mindset behind them: a sustainable environment must be reassessed continually as the platform itself evolves.
From visibility to action
Visibility only becomes valuable when it changes behaviour. Many organisations already know where their problems are: workspaces without owners, sites carrying exposure risks, and inconsistent settings that create complexity. The harder part is deciding what to do next, and making those actions repeatable.
That shaped our approach to Recommendations within Workspace Integrity. Over time, we classified them into four categories: remediation, prevention, configuration and improvement.
Remediation: acting on issues that already exist
Remediation focuses on existing problems. Through H1, we expanded the administrative actions customers can take directly on identified risks:
- Adding missing owners
- Changing sharing settings
- Archiving workspaces
- Removing users from workspaces
- Blocking sign-in
Each closes the gap between governance visibility and practical correction. Next, we are extending remediation to branding and storage, and exploring delegated actions that allow administrators to involve workspace owners directly, reflecting the need for governance responsibilities to be shared across the organisation.
Prevention: reducing the likelihood of future issues
Prevention scales better than remediation. Fixing a single workspace solves an immediate problem, but establishing the right patterns from the start can improve hundreds or thousands of future ones.
This is where automation comes in. Rather than treating templates purely as deployment mechanisms, we increasingly see them as a way to capture organisational intent. Decisions about branding, storage, ownership, privacy, content structure and sharing can all be embedded before a workspace exists, making automation less about speed and more about consistency.
Prevention is also becoming closely tied to Copilot readiness. We are expanding support for Copilot-related settings in templates, such as content discoverability and restricted site access, so good practices are built into the creation process itself. And because many customers are improving existing environments rather than building new ones, we have made those same patterns easier to extend to workspaces they already use.
Configuration: making better use of existing capabilities
Good tenant settings are rarely accidental. Analysing Integrity Scores across customer environments, we noticed a recurring pattern: many Microsoft 365 capabilities that would make an environment more sustainable were simply not being used. Sometimes customers didn't know the capability existed; sometimes the configuration was scattered, overly technical, or lacked clear guidance on good practices.
Brand Centre, Organisation News Sites and tenant-level sharing settings are good examples. None has a single correct out-of-the-box configuration, yet decisions in these areas shape governance, user experience and long-term maintainability. So we introduced configuration templates to help organisations set a capability up in the first place. During H1 we released them for:
- Brand Centre
- Organisation News
- Secure Sharing
Each provides a recommended starting point that customers can adapt to their own governance model, with additional areas, such as storage governance and authoritative sites to follow.
Improvement: more value from workspaces over time
Not every recommendation fixes a problem. Some are designed to improve the way people experience Microsoft 365 and how easily they discover, consume, and engage with information. Unlike remediation, the impact of these isn't immediately reflected in an Integrity Score; it shows up over time, in environments that are easier to navigate and better aligned with what employees expect.
Much of this shaped our Intranet work during H1. Updates across Media Gallery, Documents, People and Celebrations answered customer requests for:
- More flexibility in how content is presented
- Greater control over metadata visibility
- Consistent category management
- Richer audience targeting
- Better ways for employees to interact with content
These enhancements help organisations create experiences that feel connected rather than assembled from unrelated components. Looking ahead, we see significant opportunities to strengthen the relationship between integrity and branding. One lesson from our customer work is that branding isn't only visual consistency; it is a trust signal that shapes how employees navigate the digital workplace.
That's guiding our investment in a more coherent design system across BindTuning web parts and intranet solutions, so experiences feel recognisable and trustworthy rather than assembled from unrelated parts.
The value of Workspace Integrity
The longer we work with Microsoft 365 environments, the more convinced I become that sustainability is a product of intentionality. The health of a digital workplace is the result of hundreds of choices made over time: the settings configured, the practices systematized, the experiences designed and the behaviours encouraged.
Workspace Integrity has become a useful lens through which to view those choices. It reveals connections that stay hidden when problems are viewed in isolation. Once they're visible, it becomes easier to see where to invest and how the different parts influence one another.
The organisations that succeed are rarely those with the perfect configuration. They are the ones who continually refine and align their environment with how they want people to work. When those choices reinforce one another, they build digital workplaces that are easier to govern, easier to trust and more valuable to the people who rely on them every day.
