In our experience, housing associations rely on two prime systems, the housing management system and a CRM system. These transaction systems rarely deal with unstructured data in a well governed manner and so our clients have adopted SharePoint as a document management solution, initially on-premise but increasingly they are migrating to SharePoint online as part of the move to Office 365. GDPR has also had a big impact and some of our clients have opted for technology (Concept Searching) that automatically identifies sensitive content within files shares and emails. Configuration of DLP protocols in the Security and Compliance Centre can provide protection against unintentional distribution of sensitive content.

For the many other line of business solutions that don’t naturally fit into the large transactional systems, these are being implemented on the Office 365 platform using either the Power Suite from Microsoft (Power Automate / Power Apps etc.) or the Nintex suite of products.