How much of your Microsoft 365 environment can you actually see at once?

Not how many users you have.

Not how many sites, teams, apps or flows you have.

How much of it can you actually see connected together?

I've been working across Microsoft 365 environments for a while, and I kept running into the same thing.

There is no shortage of information. If anything, there is probably too much of it.

Users, groups, permissions, SharePoint, Teams, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Dataverse, OneDrive, Exchange, Intune, licensing, configuration...

It's all there.

But when you're actually trying to understand how everything fits together, it can be a different story.

You open one blade.

Find something.

Open another.

Cross-check it.

Go back.

Open something else.

Before long, you're jumping between different parts of the tenant trying to build the bigger picture in your head.

And if you're working with larger environments, that gets difficult pretty quickly.

The information isn't necessarily missing.

The relationships between the information are what can be difficult to see.

That got me thinking about a slightly different question:

Instead of "where do I find this information?"

"Show me what's connected to this."

That's where VisibleState started.

Start anywhere. Follow the connections.

Imagine starting with a single user.

Instead of seeing that user simply as a record with a list of properties, imagine being able to explore the relationships around them:

User → Groups → SharePoint → Teams → Power Apps → Power Automate → Power BI → Dataverse → OneDrive → Exchange → Intune

Then the questions become different:

• What does this user have access to?
• Is that access direct or coming through a group?
• What resources are connected to them?
• What depends on something they're associated with?
• Which licenses are involved?
• Are there relationships that look unusual?
• If something changes, what else might be affected?

Those questions aren't necessarily about finding another piece of information.

They're about putting information that already exists into context.

A report can tell you that something exists.

A connected view helps you understand what it is connected to.

Illustrative example below — not a real customer environment.

I'm not suggesting Microsoft 365 doesn't already give us this information

Quite the opposite.

Microsoft 365 already gives administrators an incredible amount of information and tooling.

The thing I've been thinking about is what happens when you want to look across those boundaries.

Sometimes I don't want another export.

I don't want another list.

I don't necessarily want another dashboard.

I want to start with something I'm looking at and ask:

"What's connected to this?"

And then keep following the trail.

That's the idea I'm exploring with VisibleState.

The interesting part is what happens when you change the viewpoint

The same relationships can be useful for completely different reasons.

For example:

• Administrators may want to understand access, permissions and dependencies.
• Security and governance teams may want to find unusual relationships or exceptions.
• Compliance teams may need to understand who can access something and why.
• People managing multiple environments may want a consistent way to understand what's there without rebuilding the picture manually every time.
• Leadership may not need to see the graph at all. They may simply want to know what's important, what's exposed and what could be affected.

It's still the same underlying environment.

You're just looking at it from a different angle.

And that's where I think things get interesting.

Where I'm at with it

VisibleState started as something I was building to make my own work easier.

I was spending a lot of time investigating environments, tracing access and putting information together for reports.

The individual tasks weren't necessarily difficult.

It was the jumping between different places and reconstructing the bigger picture that took the time.

So I started building something that would let me approach the environment through the relationships instead.

It's grown quite a bit from where it started, and I'm continuing to build it.

I'm not posting this as a product launch, and I'm not looking for people to sign up.

I'm genuinely interested in whether the problem I'm seeing is familiar to other people working with Microsoft 365.

So I'm curious...

If you could start with any object in your Microsoft 365 environment and immediately see what it's connected to, where would you start?

Would it be:

• Users and access
• Groups and permissions
• SharePoint and Teams
• Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Dataverse
• Licensing and resources
• Governance and unusual relationships
• Something completely different

Maybe you've already got a good way of doing this.

Maybe you still find yourself jumping between different services and piecing things together manually.

Or maybe I'm looking at the problem from the wrong direction.

What's the one relationship in your Microsoft 365 environment that you wish you could see instantly?