The Best SharePoint Apps to Run Your Business on Microsoft 365

Updated 06/08/26

The best SharePoint apps to run your business on Microsoft 365 are native applications that handle core operational processes, covering policy management, facilities and work orders, IT support, safety, contracts, CRM, and the company intranet, all inside the tenant you already own. SharePoint is used by more than 200 million people across Microsoft 365 tenants, and Forrester's Total Economic Impact study of Microsoft 365 E3 found that replacing standalone file sync and share tools with OneDrive and SharePoint saved organizations an average of $15.13 per user per month, before factoring in any of the operational apps below. 

There's a measurable cost to the alternative too. A Harvard Business Review study of 137 workers across three Fortune 500 companies found the average employee toggles between apps and websites roughly 1,200 times a day, spending just under four hours a week reorienting after each switch, around 9% of their time at work. Each standalone tool you bolt on adds to that count, and each process you bring inside Microsoft 365 takes some of it back. 
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The apps in this list are all built natively on Microsoft 365, which means no extra logins, no separate platforms, and no data leaving the environment you already control. Here's what's worth knowing about each one.

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The short answer:

SP Policy Manager

SP Policy Manager for policy lifecycle and acknowledgments

SP Facilities Manager

SP Facilities Manager ​for work orders and maintenance

SP CRM

SP CRM Core ​for pipeline management

SP Safety

SP Safety for incident reporting and EHS compliance

SP Employee Hub

SP Employee Hub for the company intranet

SP IT Helpdesk

SP IT Helpdesk for ticketing and IT service management

SP Contract Tracker

SP Contract Tracker ​for contract visibility and renewals. 

What Counts as a SharePoint App?

A SharePoint app means one of three things. Native applications built directly on SharePoint sites, lists, and libraries, running entirely inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. Standalone SaaS products with a SharePoint connector, where your data lives on the vendor's servers and SharePoint is just a sync point. Or small AppSource add-ins that bolt one feature onto a page. Every app on this list is the first kind: built with SharePoint, Power Apps, and Power Automate, with your data staying in your tenant under your own security and permissions. 

Every app here had to meet four criteria: built natively on Microsoft 365, works inside Teams as well as SharePoint, customizable without code, and covers a complete business process rather than a single feature. That filter cuts most of what appears on generic app roundups.

The 7 Best SharePoint Apps for Business

1. SP Policy Manager

Most organizations hit a point where policies are technically “managed”, but nobody's quite sure which version is current, whether the right people have read them, or when they were last reviewed. It tends to live across a mix of SharePoint folders, email threads, and someone's desktop. SP Policy Manager tidies all of that up with features including centralized storage, version control, automated reminders when policies are due for review, and a clear record of who has acknowledged what.

The detail worth understanding is how the acknowledgment loop actually closes. Review notifications fire around 30 days before a policy's expiration date, so the review conversation happens while there's still time to act on it. And when an employee hasn't signed off by the due date, the reminder goes to both the employee and their manager, which means chasing compliance stops being HR's job alone. Each acknowledgment sits against the employee's record, so when an auditor asks who read the updated data protection policy and when, the answer takes seconds rather than a week of email archaeology which makes it the natural starting point for HR, compliance, and quality teams.. 

2. SP Facilities Manager

Facilities teams often end up as the accidental owners of a dozen different systems: one for work orders, one for asset records, a spreadsheet for maintenance schedules, and a shared inbox for everything else. SP Facilities Manager replaces that sprawl with a single SharePoint-based hub covering work orders, asset tracking, preventative maintenance, and space management. The practical benefit is that nothing falls through the cracks between systems, and the team isn't wasting time chasing updates across tools.
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Because work orders link back to specific assets, the maintenance history builds itself over time, and that record starts answering the questions that matter at budget season: which equipment generates repeat callouts, what's costing more to maintain than to replace, and where preventative maintenance would pay off. Walker Therapeutic and Educational Programs took this route across multiple campuses, running assets, tickets, and records on SharePoint Online inside their existing Microsoft 365 environment, and the deciding factor was that staff already knew the platform, so there was no learning curve standing between them and adoption. It's a strong fit for operations and facilities teams in mid-sized organizations, and for sectors like education, government, and healthcare where a standalone CMMS is hard to justify on budget. 

3. SP CRM Core

Most off-the-shelf CRMs get adopted by the sales team and ignored by everyone else, partly because they're separate from the tools people actually use every day. SP CRM Core sits inside Microsoft 365, so opportunities, accounts, leads, and campaigns are managed in the same environment as email, documents, and Teams conversations. It's particularly useful for mid-sized organizations that need proper pipeline visibility but don't need the full weight of Salesforce implementation.

Global Impact is a useful example of what that looks like in practice. Managing 38 charitable zones worldwide, they used SP CRM to coordinate campaigns and improve donor reporting while staying flexible as budgets and priorities shifted, the kind of non-standard structure that usually forces expensive customization in a traditional CRM.
​Read the full Global Impact case study.

4. SP Safety

EHS management is one of those areas where the gap between what's documented and what's happening on the ground tends to grow quietly over time. SP Safety brings incident reporting, hazard tracking, inspections, and compliance records into Microsoft 365, so safety data is actively maintained rather than filed away. For organizations in construction, manufacturing, healthcare, or any environment with real compliance exposure, having everything in one auditable system makes a meaningful difference when something does go wrong. 
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The design detail that matters most is how low the reporting barrier sits. Employees log incidents and near-miss observations from inside the Microsoft 365 tools they already use, through a dynamic form that only shows relevant fields, and reporting rates climb when there's no separate system to log into. Every work area and piece of equipment carries its own safety history, so one forklift's record shows its incidents, corrective actions, and inspections in a single view, and dashboards produce regulatory output including OSHA 300 reports, so safety managers spend their time acting on data rather than compiling it.

5. SP Employee Hub

The classic intranet problem: someone builds it, it looks great at launch, and within six months it's out of date and nobody visits it. SP Employee Hub is designed to avoid that by giving each department a structured template to maintain their own space (news, documents, services, events) within a consistent overall framework. Employees get a single point of access to most of what they need, and the maintenance burden is distributed rather than sitting with one person. It's installed in over 1,000 organizations and tends to be one of the quicker wins for companies that want an intranet without building one from scratch.
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Here's the part of the intranet conversation that rarely gets said out loud: news and announcements are the lowest-value thing an intranet does, and you can get those from a basic SharePoint communication site. The real return sits in self-service, employees finding their own answers, locating the right form or the current policy, and raising service requests without a phone call or an email chain. The math makes the case for any overhead function. At a 10% profit margin, covering one additional $70,000 administrative hire takes $700,000 in new revenue. A self-service hub lets HR, IT, and operations support a growing headcount without growing at the same rate themselves, which turns the intranet from a communications project into an operational asset. SP Employee Hub

6. SP IT Helpdesk

IT teams managing support through a shared inbox know the problem well; requests get missed, there's no visibility into what's open, and reporting on workload is basically impossible. SP IT Helpdesk. moves ticketing, change management, asset tracking, and technical documentation into a single Teams and SharePoint-based system. Because it lives inside Microsoft 365, it also means IT isn't asking people to log into a separate tool just to raise a support request, which, unsurprisingly, tends to improve the quality of information coming in.

Two design decisions matter more than the feature list here. First, tickets can arrive three ways: emailed to a shared support mailbox, submitted through the portal, or captured from a web form, so rolling it out doesn't depend on changing everyone's behavior on day one. Second, every ticket can cross-reference the asset register, which means over time the helpdesk tells you which hardware generates the most cases, and refresh decisions get made on evidence rather than instinct. Networked Energy Services went down this path to manage IT support across global offices, streamlining ticket management, speeding up response times, and giving employees a clear view of their own requests inside the tools they already used every day. It suits internal IT teams of almost any size, from a couple of technicians sharing a queue to a structured service desk that needs change management and asset records kept in the same place in 

7. SP Contract Tracker

Contracts have a habit of going invisible once they're signed. The renewal date lives in a spreadsheet under a tab nobody checks, the cancellation window closes, and the business is locked into another year of something finance was planning to drop.SP Contract Tracker  gives you a centralized place to develop, track, and store contracts on your Microsoft 365 tenant, with role-based access, automated alerts ahead of renewal dates, and a publishing flow that converts the approved Word document to a PDF in the active contracts library, so employees only ever see the final version. When an end date passes with no action taken, the system flips the status to expired and notifies the contract owner automatically.

It focuses deliberately on tracking and visibility rather than full contract lifecycle management, which is the level most small and mid-sized organizations actually need, and it's a natural fit for the finance, operations, and legal teams who own renewals. Because everything sits in your own tenant, the contracts and their data remain yours and fully accessible even if you stop subscribing.

Which App Should You Start With?

​The honest answer depends on where the pain is loudest. Organizations that have recently scrambled to prove who read a policy during an audit usually start with SP Policy Manager. Where IT support runs through a shared inbox, SP IT Helpdesk delivers the fastest visible win. Facilities teams tracking maintenance requests in a spreadsheet get quick value from SP Facilities Manager, while a contract that auto-renewed when nobody wanted it to is the classic trigger for SP Contract Tracker. If employees keep asking where to find things, SP Employee Hub gives everyone a single front door. Sales pipelines still living in spreadsheets point to SP CRM, and if compiling incident data for OSHA reporting eats days each quarter, SP Safety is the place to begin. Most organizations start with one app and add others over time, since everything shares the same platform, permissions, and familiar interface.

How the Apps Work Together

​Each app stands on its own, but they're built as parts of one digital workplace, sharing the same interface conventions, permissions model, and document structure. The practical effect shows up once you run more than one. The helpdesk can push policies and forms up to the intranet's self-service area, so employees find their own answers before a ticket ever gets raised. Service requests behave the same way whether they're going to IT, HR, facilities, or safety, with a central service capability routing each request to the right department and keeping the employee notified along the way. So the second and third apps cost less effort than the first, since each one plugs into a structure that already exists instead of arriving as another standalone tool to govern.

Conclusion

The common thread across all of these is that they work inside Microsoft 365 rather than alongside it. That means your team isn't switching between platforms, your data stays in one governed environment, and you're getting more value from a platform you're already paying for. It's also worth knowing that the trade-off most managers fear with packaged apps doesn't apply here, since these apps are 99% customizable, so they adapt to how your organization works rather than forcing your processes into someone else's template.

If you're not sure where to start, the SP Marketplace apps tend to be the most practical entry points for organizations that need structured business processes in policy, contracts, facilities, safety and HR without the overhead of enterprise software. You can explore the full suite at spmarketplace.com or get in touch if you want to talk through what makes sense for your setup.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between a SharePoint app and a standalone SaaS tool?

​A SharePoint app runs inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant, so your data stays under your security, permissions, and compliance policies. A standalone SaaS tool stores your data on the vendor's servers, adds another login and subscription, and creates one more place where information can drift out of sync with the rest of the business.

Do SP Marketplace apps work in Microsoft Teams?

​Yes. The apps are built on SharePoint and surface inside Teams, so staff can raise a ticket, check a work order, or read a policy without leaving the place they already spend their day.

Are the apps no-code, and can we customize them ourselves?

​The apps come ready to use out of the box and are 99% customizable. They're built with SharePoint, Power Apps, and Power Automate, so an internal IT team can adapt forms, workflows, and branding using standard Microsoft tools, or SP Marketplace can handle the changes for you.

Where does our data live?

​Everything lives in your Microsoft 365 tenant. The apps and their data sit on your SharePoint sites and remain yours, fully accessible even if you stop using SP Marketplace's subscription and support services.

Do these apps work with Office 365?

​Yes. Microsoft retired the Office 365 branding and the platform is now Microsoft 365, so if your organization holds licenses you still think of as Office 365, these apps run on that same environment.

Should we build our own apps with Power Apps instead?

​Building from scratch gives you full control, and it also means months of development, testing, and ongoing maintenance owned by your team. SP Marketplace apps start from a complete, working business process built on the same Microsoft tools, and because they're 99% customizable you can still shape them to fit how your organization works.