About Us
Welcome to Lightning Tools
Lightning Tools is a leading provider of innovative SharePoint and Microsoft 365 tools, empowering organizations to enhance collaboration, productivity, and security. Since 2007, we’ve been delivering powerful yet easy-to-use solutions for permissions management, reporting, automation, and discussion forums. Our passion for simplifying complex tasks drives us to create intuitive tools that help businesses get the most out of Microsoft 365. With a customer-focused approach and a commitment to excellence, we continue to evolve, ensuring our solutions meet the ever-changing needs of modern workplaces.
Our Mission
Empowering Productivity

At Lightning Tools, our mission is to simplify SharePoint and Microsoft 365, making collaboration, automation, and security effortless for organizations worldwide. We believe in building powerful, intuitive solutions that enhance productivity and empower users to achieve more with less complexity.

  • Streamline SharePoint permissions management
  • Enhance data visibility with advanced reporting tools
  • Automate processes to boost efficiency
  • Facilitate seamless collaboration across teams
  • Provide intuitive, no-code solutions for business users
  • Adapt and innovate to meet evolving workplace needs
  • Offer outstanding customer support and training
  • Foster a community of learning and knowledge-sharing
Our Story
From Startup to Global Impact

Founded in 2007 in the UK by co-founders Brett Lonsdale and Nick Swan, Lightning Tools began as a small limited company with a mission to simplify SharePoint for businesses. Our first product, BDC Meta Man, helped organizations streamline their Business Data Catalog configurations. As SharePoint evolved, so did we—expanding our product lineup to address permissions management, reporting, automation, and collaboration.

  • Established in 2007 with a focus on BDC Meta Man
  • Expanded product range to enhance various SharePoint capabilities
  • Grew from a UK-based startup to a global software provider
  • Opened a North American office in Orlando, Florida
  • Brett Lonsdale became a Microsoft 365 MVP in 2018
  • Became ISO27001 & ISO9001 Accredited

From our humble beginnings, we’ve built a reputation for delivering innovative, user-friendly solutions that empower businesses worldwide. At the heart of our success is a deep commitment to customer care—we pride ourselves on providing responsive support, expert guidance, and a customer-first approach in everything we do. Whether through personalized demos, ongoing training, or direct engagement with our product team, we ensure every customer gets the most value from our solutions. Our culture is built on trust, collaboration, and continuous improvement, making Lightning Tools more than just a software provider—we’re a partner in your Microsoft 365 journey.

“When I began my career in SharePoint training, I noticed recurring questions about the same challenges and limitations in SharePoint. I had the desire and passion to help organizations overcome these obstacles by making complex tasks simple with our products. We built Lightning Tools with a clear purpose: to listen to our customers, understand their needs, and put them first in everything we do.”
Brett Lonsdale, Co-Founder & CEO

Lightning Tools by the Numbers

From our humble beginnings in 2007 to becoming a trusted Microsoft 365 ISV, Lightning Tools has grown into a globally recognized leader in SharePoint solutions. Our commitment to innovation, customer success, and continuous improvement is reflected in the numbers. Here’s a glimpse of our impact:

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Active Customers
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In over 90 countries
what our
clients
say…
testimonials
AC
Andrew Connell
Voitanos
CEO

“We’re proud to call Lightning Tools a partner of Voitanos. With industry leading solutions and people at the front of customer needs with awesome tools like Lightning Conductor, Lightning Forms, and Data Viewer to name a few. Their solutions are always at the top of the list when our customers ask us for solutions to challenges they have in their organization!”

Kurt Rolland
Covenant Technology Partners
Principal Architect

“Our customers business users now complete forms which kick-off workflows and assign tasks. The new forms guide the user to provide more accurate and
complete information. Once the form is submitted, the associated tasks are assigned and emailed to the appropriate personnel.
Immediately the users know which requests are in progress, in revision, or complete and who the open tasks are assigned to and when they were assigned. This is a significant improvement over the original process of email requests being sent back and forth with an outdated Excel form. Employees can now see who made the request, who approved it, who completed the tasks, and who fulfilled the request, making the process easy and transparent.”

Toby Pior
Andrew Wommack Ministries
Intranet Supervisor

Before Lightning Conductor, all we had available to us was default SharePoint views and custom coded JSON views, which were difficult to built and maintain and had plenty of limitations. Lightning Conductor perfectly filled that gap and allowed us to easily create simple dashboards that pull from SharePoint lists. Read more

Gary Buck
Network Rail
IMS Manager

I was just about managing to create as view in my document library but it meant that I was the only one who could create views and it took me forever to create each view as it came along. With this tool I am able to very quickly create the view I need and can also let others self-serve. The tool I am sure will continue to benefit us in many ways.

Julie Bird
Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service
M365 and SharePoint Deployment

Having experience of SharePoint On Premise and also SharePoint Online, there isn’t an out of the box app/webpart that enables you to ‘roll up content’ from a variety of source’s (in my case SP Lists, but there are many other data sources it works with) across site collections with an easy to use and intuitive interface which is what Lightning tools excels at.

Miroslav Pomsar
Veolia
System Administrator

Due to the large proportion of external workers, as well as new and departing employees, it is necessary to frequently change user and group permissions at all levels and in all areas of SharePoint data structures. In those cases, the Lightning Tools DeliverPoint tool is a great and valid helper for us. Also it is very useful for making reports of using rights of relevant objects and their subsequent processing in reports for auditors etc.

Ellie Wormsley
Trust Housing Association
Senior Service Designer & Improvement Lead

When first starting to use Lightning Forms, we had fairly simple use cases including a light touch Contact Management tool to allow colleagues to request a callback on behalf of a customer, and a Repair Request & Track tool for people to request a repair to their property and track its progress. While simple, these two cases have been largely successful and popular internally.
We are now looking to more complex use cases, including revamping our void property reletting process. This will bring together a number of departments and allow them to work together on each void in a visual way, giving everyone access to real time information and updates. This is particularly vital considering our colleagues work more remotely. We feel this solution is very powerful and is helping us strive to be sector leaders in this area.

Karlheins Sohl
City of Marion
Records Manager

We’ve used lightning forms on literally dozens of our SharePoint sites now and it’s just excellent, especially because it doesn’t interfere with our ability to governance and administer the sites. We’ve used lightning forms on literally dozens of our SharePoint sites now and it’s just excellent, especially because it doesn’t interfere with our ability to governance and administer the sites.

PaulShadwell
Paul Shadwell
Ayaltis AG
Chief Technology Officer

Lightning Conductor helped us simplify a cumbersome document review process, making the process more efficient, more accurate, and more user-friendly.  It has also provided greater visibility to the controlled documents on our websites, enabling enhanced tracking of document control metrics.

stephanie
Stephanie Stamm
Graphic Packaging International
Training Development Specialist

Lightning Conductor helped us simplify a cumbersome document review process, making the process more efficient, more accurate, and more user-friendly.