For years, executives from Microsoft and document management platform provider M-Files would meet across the aisles at industry events, often as competitors. Today, the story has changed. The two companies are now partners, collaborating to build integrated solutions to help businesses work more productively and securely.
“All the years we would see each other at different events, we would be competing,” recalls Ian Story, principal architect for OneDrive and SharePoint at Microsoft. “I’m excited just to be sitting here now as partners.”
For Antti Nivala, founder and CEO of M-Files, the partnership aligns with his initial vision when founding M-Files.
“Right from the start, my core idea was to offer the best possible experience to end users,” he explains. “Most of the customers we work with use Microsoft tools as their digital workplace. So, it’s been important for me to make sure that M-Files integrates with Office tools, with the Windows operating system, and today with Microsoft 365 in the cloud.”
That integration has reached a new level as M-Files enables users to co-author and edit documents simultaneously in Microsoft 365 desktop applications while the M-Files platform organises information, guides business processes, and automates security and compliance.
“Co-authoring is very important for M-Files users,” says Nivala. “M-Files serves customers best when it’s not just the system of record, but also the system of work. Compliance becomes automatic. You can just do your work while everything else happens behind the scenes.”
Story adds: “It provides 100 per cent of the native co-authoring features of Microsoft 365 – comments, mentions, presence awareness, working with Copilot – not partial functionality.”
Underpinning these capabilities is Sharepoint Embedded, an API-only solution that enables app developers to utilise the Microsoft 365 file and document storage functionality.
“The solution uses the core storage technology, compliance and security capabilites of SharePoint, but not the user interface,” says Story. “Users only interact through M-Files’ user interface. It’s the best of both worlds.”
Co-authoring marks the beginning of what Nivala and Story envisage as a much deeper collaboration, with the development work the two companies have already done opening up new avenues for innovation.
“We now have this tight integration between M-Files and Microsoft 365, essentially using Microsoft 365 storage for the content,” says Nivala. “That brings quite a lot of possibilities. There are so many use cases that are ideal for M-Files – from simple sync and share to high-end document management. The partnership just makes a ton of sense.”
For Nivala, the real value of the new partnership for Microsoft customers comes from the contextual information M-Files can provide.
“We integrate with business systems like SAP and Salesforce, and use those business objects as context for documents,” he says. “It’s not just document management. From customer data to plant and equipment data – you can pull it all together with metadata inside Microsoft 365. That’s quite unique to M-Files.”
M-Files customers will now be able to make use of Sharepoint capabilities through the M-Files interface
AI adds another layer of opportunity for Microsoft and M-Files to explore.
“Having Copilot natively access content is an exciting prospect,” says Nivala. “By exposing business context and documents in M-Files to Copilot, alongside the Microsoft Graph, you really get to the right conclusion for whatever the user needs.”
Story can also foresee the companies working together to develop specialised AI agents.
“I can imagine future agents for tax and accounting, engineering or life sciences,” he says. “With the business object context from M-Files and collaboration data from Microsoft Teams and email in the Microsoft Graph, it’s a really powerful combination.”
Security and compliance will remain a central focus of the collaboration.
“A very practical example is sensitivity labels,” says Nivala. “Now, thanks to the integration, we can create sensitivity labels automatically with metadata. If a document relates to a confidential project, metadata can trigger encryption and prevent oversharing.”
Story highlights the compliance advantages for customers when working on Microsoft 365 through the M-Files platform.
“There’s a simplicity in knowing all of your content is in one place,” he says. “You don’t have some in Microsoft 365 and some somewhere else. It’s protected by Microsoft Purview, with certifications like FedRAMP, SOC 2 and HIPAA. If customers ask if they have access to Microsoft Defender or Advanced Threat Protection, the answer is yes – it’s just like any other content in Microsoft 365. It’s all built natively into Word, Excel and even Acrobat. No plugins, no extra tools – it just works.”
Both Nivala and Story see the current integrations as just the beginning.
“The combination of Microsoft 365 and M-Files isn’t just about solving problems today – it’s about laying the groundwork for how people will collaborate in the future,” says Story. “With AI, compliance and seamless co-authoring built in, we’re helping customers move towards a workplace where content is always available, always secure, and always in context.”
Nivala agrees: “This is the start of a much bigger journey. The more intelligence and automation we bring into the daily flow of work, the closer we get to making information management effortless. That’s the vision – and we’re only getting started.”
Discover insights from these partners and more in the Autumn 2025 issue of Technology Record. Don’t miss out – subscribe for free today and get future issues delivered straight to your inbox.