Your organization runs on Microsoft^® 365. Teams for collaboration. SharePoint for documents. Outlook for communication. It's where work happens, and you've invested accordingly.

But here's what keeps IT leaders and compliance officers up at night: Microsoft 365 isn't your only system. You've also got Salesforce^® tracking customer relationships. Maybe SAP^® running financials. A specialized platform for your industry. And content? It's scattered across all of them.

Microsoft 365 is exceptional at what it does. But when your business processes span multiple platforms, you need cloud content management software that connects all of them.

The Microsoft 365 reality check

The more successful your Microsoft 365 adoption becomes, the faster content sprawl accelerates. Without a central control center, critical data becomes buried in a labyrinth of Teams channels and SharePoint sites, invisible to the governance policies that protect your organization.

Most organizations also rely on CRM systems, ERP platforms, and industry-specific applications: claims management for insurance, case management for financial services, regulatory systems for life sciences, or specialized platforms for government agencies. Content governance that only covers Microsoft 365 leaves gaps that auditors, regulators, and litigation holds will find.

What single-ecosystem solutions miss

Some content management approaches focus on "managing in place," indexing content within SharePoint and applying metadata. This works well if Microsoft 365 is your entire content universe.

But for most enterprises, especially in regulated industries, it isn't.

A customer complaint in your CRM relates to documents in SharePoint. A supplier contract connects to purchase orders in your ERP. A compliance policy applies to records across multiple repositories. Cloud content management solutions confined to a single ecosystem create a new kind of silo that looks organized, but still breaks down at the boundaries where business actually happens.

One intelligent layer across every app

OpenText™ Core Content Management takes a different approach: an intelligent cloud content management platform that deliver AI-powered capabilities into Microsoft 365 and everywhere else your business runs.

Within Microsoft 365, you get native integration with Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Business workspaces—structured hubs that unite content, people, and processes—are accessible directly in Teams channels. Users can save emails as records without leaving Outlook and co-author documents with full governance running in the background.

Beyond Microsoft 365, OpenText content integration extends the same content, same governance, and same intelligence to Salesforce, SAP, Google Workspace, and more. Content gets organized around business context (customers, cases, projects), not folder hierarchies. The result is one source of truth across your entire application landscape.

For regulated industries, this means content management that spans your Microsoft environment and your specialized systems with unified compliance, audit trails, and retention policies.

Governance that travels with your content

Compliance requirements don't respect application boundaries. Organizations face retention policies that span multiple repositories, litigation holds across platforms, and audit trails that must capture every content action, regardless of where it happened.

Whether you're navigating compliance requirements in healthcare, financial services, life sciences, or government, the challenge is the same: fragmented content means fragmented compliance.

OpenText doesn't just add another layer; it provides the governance anchor for your entire digital estate. Through business integrations across Microsoft, Salesforce, and SAP, you move from reactive cleanup to proactive control. This isn't "manage in place." It's governed everywhere.

AI that works because your content is ready

AI adoption is top of mind, and Microsoft Copilot is part of that conversation. But AI tools are only as good as the content they can access. If your content is scattered and ungoverned, AI produces incomplete answers—or worse, hallucinations.

OpenText™ Content Aviator, included with OpenText Core Content Management, delivers AI-powered insights on governed content. Ask questions in natural language. Get answers drawn from trusted, policy-compliant information. Integration with Microsoft 365 means Content Aviator works as a trusted agent for Microsoft Copilot, extending AI's reach to content beyond the Microsoft ecosystem.

The result: AI that understands your business context, not just your SharePoint sites.

Real results

ScottsMiracle-Gro faced a challenge many organizations will recognize: seven different content management solutions, some out of support, with information trapped in separate systems. Preparing for an SAP S/4HANA migration, they needed a cloud content management solution.

With OpenText Core Content Management, they consolidated to a single platform in just eight weeks, integrating with Microsoft Active Directory for seamless single sign-on across the enterprise. The result: $500,000 saved in legacy license fees, a unified and searchable document store, and strengthened audit trails for compliance. The company is now positioned to leverage Content Aviator for AI-powered document summarization and insights.

As their Director of SAP Operations put it: "Once we had shown the quick wins, more departments wanted to come on board."
Want to see more? Watch how leading enterprises turn content into AI-ready intelligence.

The path forward

Your Microsoft 365 investment is sound. The question is: what happens when your content needs to work beyond Microsoft?
Some solutions optimize for a single ecosystem. OpenText™ Core Content Management delivers connected intelligence across all of them, with governance that travels wherever your content goes.

For organizations in regulated industries, this isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between fragmented compliance and unified control.

Ready to see the difference? Explore OpenText™ Content Cloud integrations for Microsoft 365. 

The post Taming the sprawl: a single control center for Microsoft 365 and beyond appeared first on OpenText Blogs.