Managing company templates in Microsoft 365 — without third-party tools
Anyone who has tackled template management in an organisation over the past few years knows the classic route: a third-party tool like Template Chooser, Templafy or a comparable add-in gets introduced, because Microsoft itself had no satisfying answer to the simple question — where do my users see the company templates when they open Word or PowerPoint? The answer was unsatisfying for a long time, and the market filled the vacuum.
What many people still don’t know: Microsoft has since closed that vacuum itself. With the so-called Organization Assets Library — a native SharePoint feature that is activated with just a few PowerShell commands — company templates for Word, PowerPoint and Excel can be made available directly in the Office applications. Exactly where end users need them: when opening the app, in the tab with the company logo, without any detour via a network drive or a separate tool.
What is the Organization Assets Library — and how does it work?
The Organization Assets Library is a SharePoint document library that you register via PowerShell as the official template source for your entire Microsoft 365 tenant. Once that is done, this library appears in Word, PowerPoint and Excel under New → [Your Company Name] — right next to Microsoft’s standard templates, fully integrated into the familiar Office interface.
This works with real template formats (.dotx for Word, .potx for PowerPoint, .xltx for Excel) just as well as with normal documents intended to serve as templates — though the real template formats are recommended, because Office correctly treats them as “new file based on this template” rather than “edit this file directly”. The difference sounds small, but in practice it is crucial if you want to prevent users from accidentally overwriting the original template.
Desktop apps (Word, PowerPoint, Excel for Windows and Mac) as well as the web versions are supported — a single configuration covers all endpoints, without platform-specific exceptions.
Step by step: Setting up the company template library
Before creating a library, the choice of site is crucial — and this is where the most common mistake happens. The template library must be readable by all users, because Office accesses exactly this library in the background when loading the template list. If even part of the workforce has no read access, those users will either see nothing at all or get an unpleasant error message.
The simplest and safest approach: create the library on the intranet main site or another site that is already accessible to everyone. This avoids the permissions discussion after the fact and keeps the configuration lean.
Create a new document library on the chosen site — “Company Templates” works perfectly as a name — and set up a sensible folder structure before uploading the first files. A proven structure:
/CompanyTemplates
/Word
/PowerPoint
/ExcelUpload the template files into the respective folders and make sure you use the real template formats. A normal .docx works technically, but a .dotx signals to Office that this is a template — and that directly affects user behaviour.
This is the point most often underestimated in practice — and the one that leads to the most uncomfortable support requests: “Why does the template suddenly look different?” The answer is almost always the same: too many people had write access.
The recommended permission concept is simple and should be enforced consistently:
- All employees → Read
- Template owners (Marketing, CI team, etc.) → Edit
- Nobody else → no write access
Also enable versioning in the library. Even if you have set permissions correctly, versioning provides a safe fallback in case a template is accidentally changed — and in M365, restoring a previous version is done so quickly that it need not be a drama.
Now comes the part that surprises most people — just how little effort it actually takes. You need the SharePoint Online Management Shell module and SharePoint administrator rights.
# Connect to the SharePoint Admin Center
Connect-SPOService -Url https://YOURTENANTNAME-admin.sharepoint.com
# Register the library as a template source
Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary `
-LibraryUrl https://YOURTENANTNAME.sharepoint.com/sites/YOURSITE/CompanyTemplates `
-OrgAssetType OfficeTemplateLibraryThat is it. No additional configuration portal, no XML, no app registration. Microsoft takes over distribution to all users in the tenant from here — and this is the moment when most admins pause briefly and ask themselves why they didn’t do this three years ago.
In addition to the template library, you can register a second library as an image source, which then appears in Office under Insert → Pictures → Organisation Photos. This is particularly handy for companies that want to give employees quick access to approved logos, icons or stock photos without them ending up on external sources.
Add-SPOOrgAssetsLibrary `
-LibraryUrl https://YOURTENANTNAME.sharepoint.com/sites/YOURSITE/CompanyMedia `
-OrgAssetType ImageDocumentLibraryIt can take up to 24 hours for the library to become visible to all users in the Office client. This is due to tenant caching and is not an error — so please don’t open a support ticket immediately if it doesn’t appear after five minutes.
What to check before go-live
| Topic | Details |
|---|---|
| Licence | Included in all Microsoft 365 plans that include SharePoint Online — from Microsoft 365 Business Basic upwards. No premium feature, no separate add-on, no hidden costs. |
| CDN recommendation | Microsoft recommends enabling the SharePoint CDN — particularly relevant for users at multiple locations or working from home. Optional, but noticeably improves performance.Set-SPOTenantCdnEnabled -CdnType Public -Enable $true |
| Existing third-party tools | Before migrating, check that all templates have been fully transferred — and communicate a clear timeline for retiring the old tool, so users don’t briefly see two parallel systems. |
When does a third-party tool still make sense?
The honest answer: for most mid-market companies, no longer. If the goal is to centrally manage consistent company templates and make them available to all users directly in Word, PowerPoint and Excel, the native M365 solution does exactly that — without additional cost and without additional complexity.
You need metadata-driven templates that automatically adapt depending on client, language or department — when you need granular access control at template level — or when your CI requirements are so strict that you need to technically lock fonts, colours and layouts rather than just organisationally agree on them. For these scenarios, specialised tools remain the better choice — but that is a minority of cases.
What sticks
Microsoft has delivered a clean, fully integrated solution that has long flown under the radar — and that is sufficient for a large proportion of companies still paying for third-party template tools today. Three PowerShell commands, a properly permissioned SharePoint library, and company templates appear the next time Word or PowerPoint opens exactly where users expect them: directly when creating a new file, without any detour and without any additional tool.
The only thing that can go wrong is incorrect permissions — but that is what versioning is for, and that is what this article is for.
The best solution is often the one already included in your subscription — you just need to know where to find it.
Are you already using the Organization Assets Library — or are you still paying for a third-party tool? Write to me on LinkedIn — I’m curious how many tenants haven’t activated this yet. #EspressoM365Fusion