VSTO add-ins and Microsoft Office Add-ins extend the same Office apps in opposite ways. This guide compares architecture, deployment, security, performance limits and Office.js feature depth, explains why the new Outlook and the Exchange Web Services retirement put a deadline on Outlook VSTO add-ins, and sets out when to keep VSTO, when to switch and how to migrate.
Microsoft Copilot and a custom AI assistant are not rivals for the same job — one is a £13.80-a-seat licence inside Office, the other is software built around your data, your customers and your process. This guide puts verified UK figures on both: Copilot’s real pricing and the measured government trial results, what a custom build actually costs at £1,100 a day, a 50-person worked example run down both routes over three years, the hybrid pattern that uses each for what it is best at, and a five-question decision framework that settles the choice for most businesses in an afternoon.
How a UK accountancy practice should design and secure client documents in SharePoint Online — the seven-site architecture that replaces one site per client, the metadata columns that replace folder trees, a group-based permission model with restricted access control on anti-money laundering evidence, the four external sharing settings and why Anyone links break your device policies, sensitivity labels and data loss prevention for client data, retention to Regulation 40 of the Money Laundering Regulations 2017, version limits and the 93-day recycle bin, Copilot oversharing controls, Microsoft’s own hard limits, UK licence costs with a worked forty-one person example, and a thirty-day build calendar.
Conditional Access is the most valuable security control most UK accountancy firms already own and have never switched on. It sits inside every Microsoft 365 Business Premium subscription, it costs nothing extra to configure, and it is the difference between a practice that merely asks staff for a code and a practice that can say […]
Microsoft 365 Business Premium is the licence almost every UK accountancy practice under 300 people ends up on, and the question partners ask us most often is whether it is genuinely enough. It is a fair question, because the answer decides whether a practice is carrying an unfunded risk or paying twice for protection it […]
Copilot for accountants is three separate products wearing a single name, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason a promising practice pilot quietly dies in week three. The licensed assistant that can read your own mailboxes, working papers and Teams threads is only one of the three. A free chat experience is […]
Microsoft 365 for accountancy firms is no longer just the place the email lives. It is where the client files sit, where the payroll instructions arrive, where the engagement letters are signed, and where an attacker who wants a tax refund diverted will go first. For most UK practices the Microsoft 365 for accountancy tenant […]
Copilot for hotels is three different products wearing one name, and choosing the wrong one is the single most common reason a hospitality pilot quietly dies. Microsoft 365 Copilot — the licensed assistant that can read your own mailboxes, documents and Teams messages — is only one of the three. The free chat experience is […]
Hotel phishing is the most successful attack running against UK hospitality right now, and it does not start in a server room. It starts at a desk in your lobby, or in a back-office reservations inbox, where somebody whose entire job is to be helpful to strangers opens an attachment from a stranger. Every other […]
Microsoft 365 setup for hotels is a different project from the office rollout most IT providers know how to do. An accountancy practice has forty people, forty desks and forty mailboxes. A hotel has a front desk that four people share across three shifts, a housekeeping floor that never touches a keyboard, a reservations inbox […]
