Making sense of Microsoft 365 — email, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and where to store your files. Practical guidance for the tools you’re already paying for.
Click a shared document in the middle of a meeting for a quick look and instead the whole screen jumps into a full Teams-embedded editor, loading, asking to sign in again. Somewhere else, a half-typed chat message vanishes because the channel got switched before it was sent. None of this is exactly a bug — … Read more
An employee leaves. Their account is disabled the same week — routine offboarding practice. Eight months later, someone needs a contract that person negotiated, or an email thread that explains why a project went off the rails. And they go looking. The mailbox is gone. The OneDrive folder is gone. Nothing was deleted on purpose … Read more
Most businesses set up Microsoft 365, assign licenses to everyone who needs one, and then don’t think about it again. People leave. Roles change. A contractor finishes a project. Someone gets a second license by accident when they get a new computer. The licenses stay, quietly billing every month. This was always a minor annoyance. … Read more
At some point, most small businesses outgrow whatever they started with for email. Maybe you’re still using your internet provider’s email and you’ve lost messages. Maybe you’re on an old Exchange server that someone set up ten years ago and nobody fully understands anymore. Maybe you’ve had the same Gmail account since the business launched … Read more
Microsoft 365 provides three places to store files and almost no guidance on which to use. The practical rule: OneDrive is your personal work drive for files only you need, SharePoint is the shared filing cabinet for anything the whole team or company needs long-term, and Teams is your active project workspace — which stores its files in SharePoint anyway. This post also covers a 2026 storage change (new OneDrive accounts capped at 150 GB) and explains why Microsoft 365 files are not automatically backed up the way most users assume.
Both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are capable platforms, but for most Calgary small businesses — especially those using complex documents, accounting software, or Microsoft-centric vendors — Microsoft 365 is the practical default. This post breaks down the differences in collaboration tools, email, storage, pricing, and offline capability so businesses can choose without relying on a vendor sales pitch.