Your M365 ROI is trapped in Outlook

You're paying for Microsoft 365. You're using less than half of it.

Your organization invested in Microsoft 365. SharePoint for collaboration, Teams for communication, OneDrive for storage, maybe Copilot on top.

Most organizations achieve only 40% utilization of what they're paying for. Not because the tools are complicated, but because the information that should power them is locked in personal inboxes, disconnected from everything else.

The platform is ready. The data isn't. That’s the Microsoft 365 paradox.

More training won't fix a data problem

When M365 adoption stalls, most organizations reach for the same playbook: SharePoint workshops, Teams training sessions, Copilot readiness seminars, change management initiatives.

Utilization barely shifts. Because the problem was never that people didn't understand the tools. It's that the tools don't have what they need. Your documents might be in SharePoint, but the emails that explain those documents (what was agreed, who approved what, why the scope changed) are still in Outlook. Unsearchable by anything except the person who received them.

Here's the thing nobody talks about: you can have excellent M365 adoption scores and still have most of your project knowledge invisible to the platform. Adoption measures who's logging in and what's being uploaded. It doesn't measure what is missing.

Five barriers standing between you and ROI

We've mapped five data readiness barriers that prevent organizations from getting value out of their M365 investment:

1. The email black hole: 70% of business knowledge lives in email, but it's invisible to Copilot and automation tools. If Copilot can't see it, it doesn't exist.
2. The metadata desert: Content saved without classification or retention labels. Governance tools like Purview can't govern what hasn't been tagged.
3. Context fragmentation: Conversations split across email, Teams and documents with nothing connecting them. Decision history disappears between platforms.
4. The quality crisis: Inconsistent filing, duplicates, outdated information. AI doesn't fix bad data. It amplifies it.
5. The adoption paradox: The tools that solve these problems require people to change behavior. They won't, unless the solution removes the effort rather than adding to it.
   

Every one of these traces back to the same root cause: email is disconnected from your M365 ecosystem. Ideagen's 2024 research, surveying 188 senior IT decision-makers, found that over half of IT leaders in the AEC sector are concerned about where data is stored within their organizations. The problem isn't hypothetical. It's widespread and the people responsible for fixing it already know it exists.

What disconnected email actually costs

This isn't abstract. Employees waste 65 minutes per day on manual filing, searching and recreating lost context. Multiply that across a project team, and you start to see where your M365 ROI is disappearing. When email sits outside SharePoint:

• Copilot generates answers from partial information. Users get generic responses, lose trust and stop using it. Your Copilot investment underperforms from day one.
  
• Purview can't apply retention labels to business correspondence. Records management stays manual. Audit trails have gaps.

• Every unfiled email is institutional knowledge your organization loses permanently. When someone leaves, their inbox leaves with them. The longer the disconnect continues, the wider the gap becomes.
  

  Every unfiled email is institutional knowledge your organization loses permanently. When someone leaves, their inbox leaves with them. The longer the disconnect continues, the wider the gap becomes. The question isn't whether you can afford to connect email to SharePoint. It's whether you can afford not to while competitors who have already done it pull further ahead.

What organizations getting real ROI are doing differently

Organizations that connect their email to SharePoint before implementing Copilot see 3x better AI results. They're not rebuilding their infrastructure. They're adding an intelligent bridge between Outlook and SharePoint that files email automatically, enriches it with metadata and removes the manual effort that stopped people filing in the first place.

Ideagen Mail Manager sits inside Outlook, learns from your team's filing habits and gets project emails into the right SharePoint location without extra steps. No new platform, no behavior change, no reliance on individual discipline.

We've put the full framework into a short guide: the five barriers, the real costs and a self-assessment to score your own M365 readiness.

Download The Microsoft 365 Paradox