ENow 365 Governance Accelerator 1.4.0: Turn Microsoft 365 Visibility Into Prioritized Action

Microsoft 365 environments are getting larger, more complex, and more expensive to administer, manage, and govern.

Years of content growth have created storage that organizations may be paying for without understanding why. Collaboration improvements have created layers of external sharing and permissions that are difficult to evaluate at scale. Unused licenses continue to generate costs long after users have left the organization or changed roles or projects, while Identity controls determine who and what can access the environment.

At the same time, Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI make the exposure and quality of all this underlying data more relevant. Organizations need more than lists of users, files, permissions, and configurations. To manage a Microsoft 365 tenant and build the content, collaboration, and identity foundation that enables functional, safe, and successful AI use, organizations need to be able to answer key questions:

• What represents the greatest risk?
• What is costing more money than anticipated?
• What should be prioritized and addressed first for the greatest return (whether time, risk reduction, or investment)?
• How do you quantify your current Microsoft 365 governance posture?

ENow created the free 365Gov Score alongside Microsoft MVPs so any team could answer that last question. It’s an independent, no-cost assessment that benchmarks and quantifies the current state of your Microsoft 365 governance, giving you objective evidence to inform what comes next - from shaping governance initiatives to making the case for additional time, resources, and investment with leadership.

Why Microsoft 365 Governance is Hard: Too Much Data, Too Little Prioritization

Microsoft provides administrators with enormous amounts of information about their environment. The harder problem is turning it into decisions.

IT and Modern Workplace teams still need to answer questions such as:

• How much SharePoint storage could we actually recover, and what is that capacity worth?
• Which externally shared content represents meaningful exposure rather than simply appearing on a sharing report?
• Which users can safely have licenses reclaimed without creating operational risk?
• Are foundational identity controls actually configured according to governance best practices?
• Of everything we could fix, what should we address first?

That is the focus of ENow 365 Governance Accelerator v1.4.0: moving beyond reporting what exists, toward helping organizations understand what matters, why it matters, and what to do next when teams are also expected to keep dozens of other operational tasks and strategic transformation projects moving forward.

What’s New in ENow 365 Governance Accelerator 1.4.0

Figure 1. Microsoft 365 Storage Overview in ENow 365 Governance Accelerator

Version 1.4.0 of ENow's 365 Governance Accelerator expands governance across four major areas, including entirely new categories:

• Storage Optimization - An entirely new Storage category with its own governance score and dashboards, including the ability to quantify recoverable capacity and potential cost savings.
• SharePoint exposure - Enhanced SharePoint dashboards prioritize actual exposure rather than simply cataloging shared content.
• License Optimization - Moves into the SaaS platform with evidence-based recommendations for reclaiming licenses safely.
• Identity - New Entra ID checks bring foundational identity controls directly into the governance score.

Version 1.4.0 also marks the official launch of Professional Edition, expanding the available report catalog with additional depth across Licensing, SharePoint, and OneDrive.

Behind the scenes, the processing engine has also been rebuilt to support the scale and analysis required for these capabilities.

Microsoft 365 Storage: Turn Unmanaged Storage into Recoverable Capacity and a Defensible Budget Case

Microsoft 365 storage volume increases due to version history, duplicate files, oversized content, and libraries sitting untouched for years. Companies end up bumping against their included capacity or writing a check for more. The result is bloated, growing storage costs, plus stale content and workspaces that muddy operational focus (and can negatively impact the quality of Copilot and AI results).

ENow’s new Microsoft 365 Storage category turns that inventory into a recovery plan by showing you how storage is distributed across your Microsoft 365 tenant. It encompasses which libraries and files drive consumption, where duplicates hide, which libraries have gone stale, and how much of your SharePoint footprint is nothing but old versions. The Storage Savings Calculator turns that picture into a decision, with a defensible answer to the questions leadership asks:

• Where is our storage going?
• What storage capacity can we recover?
• What is the storage recovery worth?

Figure 2. Useful vs Recoverable Storage in ENow 365 Governance Accelerator

Microsoft 365 Storage Savings Calculator

With ENow 365 Governance Accelerator, teams can evaluate the impact of storage changes by modeling various remediation scenarios.

Move the slider to a version limit, and the calculator recalculates what you’d recover and what it’s worth, library by library. Three levers model the change before you act: version history, duplicate copies, and archiving, with no double-counting between them. It also separates the storage you get back outright from storage that simply moves to a cheaper rate, so the projection stays honest.

What comes back is a number you can take to leadership: if you’re inside your included Microsoft 365 capacity, a case for delaying your next purchase; if you’re already buying more, an annual cost you can stop paying, priced on your own agreement rather than an industry average.

Why SharePoint Version History Drives Your Microsoft 365 Storage Costs

Most SharePoint storage isn’t what you’d expect. Every save keeps the previous copy in full, not just the delta, up to 500 versions by default, and rarely is version control turned off or limited. Picture a file that starts at 100 MB and grows a little with every edit: 300 full-copy versions later, that one file’s history is consuming hundreds of GBs, almost all of it old copies no one will reopen.

ENow 365 Governance Accelerator v1.4.0 ranks libraries and individual files by how much of them is version history, finds the same file stored across several sites at once, breaks the estate down by file type, and flags content nobody has touched.

• Version Storage Cost Reclamation
  Find the annual dollar cost of storage consumed by version history, based on your own inventory rather than an average. From there, you can drill into the specific files driving each library’s total. It’s a number that holds up in a budget conversation, and one the SharePoint admin center doesn’t produce.
  
  
• Files With Excessive Version History
  This dashboard works one level down, highlighting individual files with the highest version counts and the storage their history eats. Ranked libraries tell you where to look. This tells you which file to open, which is the difference between a full-blown investigative project and an afternoon.

Storage Cost Recovery Is Included in Standard Edition

The ENow team believes that cost recovery shouldn’t be cost prohibitive. The entire Storage category (Savings Calculator included) ships in our entry-level Standard Edition. We’ve included these capabilities at an accessible price, so the teams under the most pressure to control cost can afford to.

Prioritize the SharePoint Exposure That Matters Most

Years of collaboration, external sharing, and one-off permission changes can leave organizations with more content exposure than teams realize. As AI becomes part of everyday work, understanding that exposure becomes even more important. Microsoft 365 Copilot respects existing permissions, meaning the content users can access can potentially become part of their AI experience.

But not all sharing represents the same level of risk. An anonymous link with edit permissions and no expiration date deserves different attention than a read-only link expiring next month. A dormant library that still exposes information externally is more than a storage-cleanup opportunity.

For IT teams managing thousands or millions of files, links, users, and permissions, simply identifying what is shared isn’t enough. They need to understand what is exposed, who can access it, and where risk warrants attention first.

ENow 365 Governance Accelerator v1.4.0 introduces new and enhanced Exposure dashboards designed to turn complex sharing and permission data into prioritized action:

• Anonymous Link Exposure
  Identifies anonymous links and ranks them based on factors such as access level and expiration. Administrators can quickly distinguish higher-risk exposure, such as editable links that never expire, from lower-priority sharing and focus remediation where it matters most.
• External User Access
  Consolidates every site and file an external user can access, along with the highest permission they hold. IT gets a user-centric view of external exposure that makes access reviews easier and provides a practical offboarding list when a vendor, contractor, or partner relationship ends.
• Sites With Broken Permission Inheritance
  Surfaces sites where permissions have been changed independently from their parent, helping administrators uncover access exceptions that can otherwise remain buried in complex SharePoint permission structures and identify where permissions warrant closer review.

This exposure information moves teams from inventory to impact and action with less time sorting through reports and admin centers, faster identification of material exposure, and a stronger governance foundation for Microsoft 365 and Copilot/AI initiatives.

Microsoft 365 License Optimization: Find Savings Without New Risk

Unused Microsoft 365 licenses are an obvious place to look for savings. Determining whether a license is actually safe to remove is harder.

The new License Optimization engine in ENow 365 Governance Accelerator combines multiple signals, including account status and last sign-in activity before making a recommendation.

The recommendation logic is deliberately conservative. If the necessary validation cannot be completed, the recommendation defaults to keeping the license.

New usage reporting also provides visibility into Microsoft 365 application usage across Windows, Mac, mobile, and web.

The objective is not simply to identify inactive users. It is to give administrators the evidence they need to find potential savings and confidently decide whether action is appropriate.

Strengthen Microsoft 365 Governance at the Entra ID Identity Layer

Microsoft 365 access and governance ultimately depend on the identity layer driven by Microsoft Entra ID (Microsoft’s identity system).

Version 1.4.0 adds five Entra ID governance tests covering foundational controls, including MFA coverage, Global Administrator limits, and risky sign-in policies driven by any Conditional Access policies in your tenant.

Each evaluation provides a clear pass/fail result for the tenant’s current configuration along with step-by-step remediation recommendations.

Figure 3. User and Sign-in Risk Policies Configuration in ENow 365 Governance Accelerator

That turns identity governance from another configuration inventory into an actionable part of the organization’s overall Microsoft 365 governance posture.

From Finding Microsoft 365 Issues to Knowing What to Do Next

ENow 365 Governance Accelerator 1.4.0 is designed around a simple shift: Microsoft 365 teams do not need more data without context. They’re already drowning in information spread across reports and admin centers. They need a centralized view of their environment that helps them understand what matters and why, and what to do next.

With ENow, storage waste becomes recoverable capacity with a meaningful budgetary impact. Sharing inventories becomes prioritized exposure. Identity configurations become scored controls with remediation guidance. Licensing data becomes evidence-backed reclamation opportunities.

ENow 365 Governance Accelerator turns fragmented Microsoft 365 data into prioritized, decision-ready insights and defensible next steps, giving IT teams a clearer course of action to reduce risk, control unnecessary costs, strengthen governance, and prepare their environment for AI.

Built for Modern Workplace Teams, Priced for Reality

ENow’s founder, Jay Gundotra, started out as an Exchange messaging administrator, so this work is personal. He knows what it feels like to chase every Microsoft release, keep too many plates spinning, and stay a step ahead of both the technology and your users, all while keeping the organization protected and still moving forward. That balance is hard to strike.

For 22 years, ENow has followed the move to Microsoft 365 closely and evolved our products right alongside it, with one aim: to make the complex simple for administrators and Modern Workplace teams. The Community has always been part of that story. It’s why we built the free 365Gov Score with Microsoft MVPs, so any team could benchmark where they stand immediately without a lengthy sales cycle.

We believe better Microsoft 365 governance should be accessible to the teams responsible for delivering it, and you shouldn’t need an enterprise-sized investment to start addressing these challenges.

ENow 365 Governance Accelerator, Standard Edition, is priced so companies of every size can win with it:

• Up to 1,000 users: $3,500/year*
• 1,001-5,000 users: $6,500/year*
• 5,001+ users: $9,500/year*

ENow's platform provides real, measurable governance to companies of every size, from lean IT teams to the largest enterprises.

IT is usually treated as a cost center, and this is your team’s chance at a clear, measurable win: recovered storage dollars, closed exposure, reclaimed licenses, and a governance foundation ready for Copilot.

The entire Storage Optimization category ships in Standard Edition. Other capabilities mentioned in this release are Professional Edition reports, so request a demo to see exactly what’s included in each edition. You can start with Standard and upgrade to Professional whenever you’re ready to expand your access!

Where Does Your Microsoft 365 Tenant Stand Today?

Get your free 365Gov Score for a point-in-time assessment of your Microsoft 365 governance posture and to try Standard free for 7 days.

Want to learn more before trying? Request a demo of ENow 365 Governance Accelerator to see the expanded reporting, prioritization, and remediation capabilities available in Standard and Professional Editions.

*Standard Edition pricing includes processing for up to 20 TB of data and 25,000 users. Organizations with larger tenants can still purchase and use Standard Edition at the pricing listed; processing will stop once either included limit is reached. Additional processing capacity is available for an additional fee.