Why your board meeting software needs a M365 integration
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Most board meeting software will tell you it integrates with Microsoft 365 (M365). Single sign-on is supported. Teams compatibility is mentioned. Some tools let you upload from OneDrive. The integration box gets ticked in the evaluation spreadsheet.
Then the meeting organiser sits down to prepare the agenda and does something like this: opens M365, finds the document, downloads it, switches to the meeting platform, navigates to the right agenda item, uploads the file. Repeated for every attachment. Every meeting. Every cycle.
That process describes two tools sitting next to each other, not one integrated workflow. And it's precisely why we built our M365 integration differently.
In this article, we explain:
Bringing your files to the heart of meetings
Board meeting preparation is document-heavy. A single committee meeting can involve ten or more attachments, financial reports, management updates, policy papers, proposals, most of which live in M365. The workflow for getting those documents into a structured agenda has remained largely manual, regardless of which meeting platform is in use.
That manual handoff creates two compounding problems.
The first is time. For an organiser managing multiple committees, a six-step import process runs dozens of times per preparation cycle. The hours are real, and they fall on some of the busiest people in the organisation.
The second is version risk. The moment a document is downloaded and uploaded elsewhere, it becomes a snapshot. If the source file in M365 is updated after that point, which happens regularly in the days before a board meeting, the version in the agenda may no longer be current. Someone has to notice, retrieve the new version, and replace it manually.
Neither problem gets solved by an integration that stops at single sign-on.
What does a genuine M365 integration look like?
The distinction worth making is between tools that connect to M365 and tools that work inside it.
Tools that connect to M365 allow you to authenticate with your Microsoft account and, in some cases, upload files from OneDrive or M365. The document still has to travel from one system to another. The workflow is shorter, but the handoff still exists.
Tools that work inside M365 treat M365 as a native document source. You browse your sites and folders from within the meeting platform itself, search for the file you need, and import it directly into the agenda item, without switching applications, without downloading, without re-uploading.
The difference in practice is significant. For a meeting organiser, it means the document workflow and the meeting workflow happen in the same place. For an IT team, it means the integration uses proper OAuth 2.0 authentication with minimal permission scopes, supports tenant-wide admin consent, and keeps meeting data within the organisation's own Microsoft environment.
The version problem is next.
Even with a well-integrated document import, the version question does not fully disappear. A document imported into an agenda is still a point-in-time copy. If the source file changes after import, someone needs to catch it.
The next step, one that genuinely embedded Microsoft 365 board meeting software is beginning to address, is to highlight outdated documents and enable users to source the latest versions. Rather than treating the imported document as a fixed attachment, the meeting platform stays connected to the M365 source and reflects updates when they occur. The organiser does not need to monitor the source file manually. The agenda stays current.
This is where the gap between M365-compatible and M365-integrated becomes most visible. Compatibility handles the import. Integration handles what comes after.
How should you evaluate a M365 integration?
If your organisation is standardised on M365 and you are evaluating board meeting platforms, these are the questions worth asking:
- Where does the document import happen? If the answer involves downloading and re-uploading, the integration is surface-level.
- How does authentication work? A platform that uses OAuth 2.0 with minimal-scope permissions and supports IT admin tenant-wide consent is designed for enterprise M365 environments. One that uses a generic connector may create friction at the IT approval stage.
- What happens when a source document changes? If the answer is "nothing automatically," version risk is still a manual problem.
What is Sherpany's M365 integration?
We built our M365 Integration to close this gap for organisations that run Sherpany for board and committee meeting governance and Microsoft 365 for their document estate.
It happens in three simple steps:
- From the Agenda tab, meeting organisers click "Add document"
- Select M365 as the source
- Browse their sites and folders from inside Sherpany and click “add”
One Microsoft sign-in. No downloads. No switching tools. The selected file is imported directly into the agenda item, converted by Microsoft's own Office 365 engine, in three steps instead of six.
The integration uses OAuth 2.0 / OpenID Connect via the Microsoft identity platform, requests only the permissions needed, and supports tenant-wide IT admin consent. No meeting data is stored in Sherpany's Microsoft tenant.
We'll soon be adding Sync Latest Version, which will reflect the most recent M365 document in the agenda, removing the version monitoring step entirely.
M365 Integration is available now. If you’re already a Sherpany user, contact your Customer Success Manager to get started.
If your board isn’t already using Sherpany, book a free demo today and find out how our solution can enhance the impact of your meetings.