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Running Out of Storage? Check Out the New Microsoft 365 Archive Feature

Microsoft News |

Microsoft 365 SharePoint file storage provides 1TB per organization and 10GB per user. If you start to run low on space, you can expand your storage in 1GB increments at an additional cost of $ 0.20 per GB per month or $200 per TB per month. While this cost may not be significant for larger organizations, smaller to mid-sized construction organizations might be impacted, especially when storing CADD, GIS, and video files in SharePoint. SharePoint Archive, released in 2024, could be a beneficial option; check out this article for more information.

What Are Your Options If You are Running out of SharePoint Storage?

You really have three options if you need more SharePoint storage:

  1. Delete files (ensuring to remove them from the SharePoint site collection recycle bin)
  2. Move them to another external storage location
  3. Use Microsoft 365 Archive to archive the site.

Advantages of Microsoft 365 Archive

  • Rapid archiving. You can archive a site within minutes.
  • Archive sites in place. You do not need to move files to another location. You can select and archive a site from the SharePoint admin center.
  • Search indexes remain intact.
  • Reactivate sites. If you need to bring a site back online, you can reactivate it from the SharePoint admin center.
  • Cost Savings. Archive storage list price is $.05/GB/month or $50/TB/month, which is 75% cheaper than active storage. Note: these costs are as of 02/27/2025. Check this link for the Microsoft 365 Archive Cost Calculator.
  • No impact on metadata. Archiving and reactivating SharePoint sites will not impact metadata and security versioning. We tested managed metadata as well as lookup fields, and they worked as expected

Considerations When Using Microsoft Archive

  • You cannot archive a hub site or a site with a hub site assigned to it.
  • There is a reactivation cost per GB of $.60/GB/month. The fee applies regardless of whether your tenant is over or below its SharePoint capacity limit, but only if you reactivate more than seven days after the site was most recently archived. This seven-day grace period allows you to reverse an accidental archival without reactivation costs.
  • Make sure to wait 24 hours after any files have been uploaded or any changes have been made to a site you want to archive to ensure no data loss.
  • Only site-level archiving is available at the time of this article. File-level archiving will be available in July of 2026. To keep an eye out for updates to the timeline, you can view the roadmap feature here: Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365

In summary, Microsoft 365 Archive is an excellent option for placing your files into cold storage. So, if you are exceeding your 1TB allowance and you know of a SharePoint site that is no longer in use but has a lot of files, you might want to give Microsoft 365 Archive a shot.

Setting up your Microsoft 365 SharePoint infrastructure efficiently and with proper monitoring is instrumental to minimizing data sprawl and reducing your monthly bill. Lydon Solutions has been providing solutions for the construction industry on Microsoft 365 since its inception. You can reach out below for a free one-hour consultation. If you need a turnkey construction management platform for Microsoft 365 SharePoint, you can request a demo of Construction Viz here.

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What is Microsoft Viva, and Does Your Construction Organization Need It?

Microsoft News |

Microsoft Viva is an integrated platform supporting connection, insight, purpose, and growth in your organization using Microsoft 365 and Teams. It is a suite of integrated applications to help manage and support your organization’s employees. Sounds like a great addition to all the other applications available to you in Microsoft 365, right? But is the juice worth the squeeze? Check out this article to find out more.

Microsoft Viva summarized

Microsoft released Microsoft Viva on February 4, 2021, describing it as the first employee experience platform to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, well-being, and knowledge discovery directly into the flow of people’s work. Microsoft sees this fragmented market as a $300 billion opportunity.

How construction employee engagement works today

In smaller construction organizations, employee communication is oftentimes informal. Smaller construction organizations may use email, paper, or just pick up the phone to communicate with employees. These organizations are often flat, so bureaucracy is low, and employees wear multiple hats, which can lead to higher employee engagement.

In larger construction organizations, people are physically spread out, and there are management layers and departments. Communication is more formal, knowledge is more siloed, and employees can feel more disconnected from each other and the company. Also, because of COVID, more and more employees are working remotely, which can exacerbate the sense of being disconnected.

Most larger construction organizations have some sort of IT infrastructure to share organizational information, tools, training, and goals with employees via an intranet or email. Support for this effort often falls under an HR department or supporting business unit. Depending on the size of the organization and the availability of resources, the frequency and depth of this communication will vary. Ultimately, the larger the organization, the more important employee engagement is to the success of individual employees as well as to the company overall.

Where does Microsoft Viva fit?

Microsoft has created a comprehensive suite of tailored applications under the Viva moniker that fall into four main areas:

  • Employee Communications and Communities
  • Workplace Analytics and Feedback
  • Goal Setting and Management
  • Learning and Knowledge Management

Within each category, Microsoft has identified one or more applications and specific features that can be implemented across the organization.

The availability of these applications and features will vary depending on your subscription. Click here to see a detailed comparison available by subscription level (PDF).

In a nutshell, if you have Microsoft 365 E3 or higher, you will get a standard version of Viva Connections, Viva Engage, Viva Learning, and Viva Insights. However, Viva Glint, Viva Pulse, and Viva Goals will require additional subscriptions.

Microsoft has released three additional paid Viva subscriptions to upgrade the standard features and add the additional applications:

  • Viva Suite ($12/user/month) – This is the catchall for additional features to the standard versions and includes Viva Amplify, Viva Pulse, Viva Glint, and Viva Goals.
  • Viva Workplace Analytics and Employee Feedback ($6/user/month) – This level includes additional features to Viva Insights and adds Viva Pulse and Viva Glint.
  • Viva Employee Communications and Communities ($2/user/month) – The most basic add-on level includes additional features for Viva Connections and Viva Engage, as well as Viva Amplify.

What features are in the Viva Categories?

Employee Communication and Communities

The Employee Communication and Communities category allows you to create communities and share content with employees. Think of this category as a way to communicate with your employees using chat, email, and websites.

The apps and features include:

  • Viva Engage. Remember Yammer? Microsoft purchased Yammer back in 2008 for $1.2B and rebranded it as Viva Engage. Viva Engage is a communication platform like Teams where you can chat with other employees and create communities of shared interest.
  • Viva Amplify. Provides tools for communication and publishing. You can create themed and templated SharePoint sites, run communication campaigns, manage audiences, and analyze engagement. Viva Amplify requires an additional subscription.
  • Viva Connections. Gives you a custom portal that surfaces people, tasks, company events, training, and more on a modern SharePoint site customizable by role.

Workplace Analytics and Feedback

The Workplace Analytics and Feedback category provides tools to analyze how well employees are engaging. Basically, it’s a way to survey, track, report, and analyze employee behavior. The apps and features include:

  • Viva Insights. Provides personal and employee work trends. Insights include Copilot Dashboards on Microsoft 365 adoption and learning, recommendations on productivity (such as meeting and communication habits), well-being (focus time, praise to and from colleagues, and quiet time), and teamwork (colleagues you have worked with and important contacts).
  • Viva Glint. Provides employee engagement and performance across the employee lifecycle with organization-wide surveys. Viva Glint is similar to Microsoft Forms but with much more enterprise features, analytics, reporting, and AI.
  • Viva Pulse. Centralized campaign management, publishing, and reporting to reach and engage employees. Viva Pulsa is an interesting tool where you can create campaigns much like marketing campaigns and target communications for your employees, review campaigns internally for approval, send messages via email, chat, or website link, and track metrics on engagement.

Learning and Knowledge Management

The Learning and Knowledge Management category empowers employees to grow and develop their professional skills. The idea is to connect to and centralize learning paths from multiple sources and encourage a culture of continuous improvement.

Viva Learning can connect to multiple LMS (learning management systems), such as LinkedIn, SharePoint, Word, PowerPoint, audio, and video, to create a catalog of classes for employees. The home page provides an overview of courses available, in progress, completed, and bookmarked.

Goal Setting and Management

The Goal Setting and Management category helps employees clarify strategies and goals, manage objectives and key results (OKRs), and understand priorities to improve business results. Goals and OKRs are formally tracked with clear success criteria with owners and visibility to their completion progress.

How Microsoft Viva can help construction organizations

Onboarding is an excellent example of how Microsoft Viva can offer improvements to larger construction organizations. If you think of your experience starting a new job, you probably remember the often fragmented tools, lack of training, and frequently outdated communication feeds. Keeping an employee engaged throughout the process and their entire career is critical to their success and integration into the organization.

  • Employee Communication and Communities. When your organization hires a new employee, you could add them to a Viva Engage community for construction where they can meet the team, be assigned a virtual mentor, and begin reaching out to content experts using chat. With Viva Amplify, the new employee would receive a welcome email linking to a new hire website with actions to be taken throughout the onboarding process. Viva Connections would be the new employee’s portal to collect all the actions they need to take to get acclimated with the organization, provide links to training, and provide a news feed about the organization and upcoming projects.
  • Workplace Analytics and Feedback. On a weekly or monthly basis, the employee would receive a survey via Viva Glint on how well they are integrating into the organization, areas for improvement, and opportunities for growth. Viva Pulse could provide target communications specifically to new hires so they are sent relevant information and next steps during the onboarding stage.
  • Learning and Knowledge Management. Your organization could use Viva Learning to curate a training regimen with LinkedIn training for general project management and standard software packages. The app could also surface in-house videos and PowerPoint training that employees need to complete as part of their onboarding cycle.
  • Goal Setting and Management. Employee goals could be added, such as completing the necessary training, visiting a job site, meeting with key stakeholders, finding a mentor, and reviewing guidelines and policies. Their manager and HR can evaluate progress against these goals throughout the onboarding process.

In summary, Viva could be an effective set of tools to better equip employees for successfully integrating into an organization throughout their careers. Lydon Solutions is always on the lookout for ways to improve efficiencies for construction organizations. If you are interested in implementing Viva, you can reach out for a free consultation using the form below.

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The New Microsoft Planner: One Plan to Rule All Your Construction Projects!

Microsoft News |

The latest Microsoft Planner now includes Planner, To Do, and Project. The new version does not just bring these apps together into one task management solution. It allows you to see all of your tasks across every Team, which I think has been long overdue. Check out this post to find out more.

Microsoft Planner is the app that most people use, but oftentimes, they don’t know its name. Outside of Teams, rarely does anyone actually use the stand-alone Planner app. Most likely, the reason for that is that tasks can be created in many different applications, so which one do you go to in order to see all of your tasks?

Task Management in Microsoft 365

Tasks in Microsoft 365 is a pretty broad term and touches many different applications. If you think about all of the locations where tasks can get created in Microsoft 365, it’s a spaghetti network of related but independent applications.

For example, before this update, you could choose to create tasks in any of the following applications:

  • Excel – ☑Pro: Ultimate flexibility. ☒Con: Source/version management of tasks.
  • Planner – ☑Pro: Easy to use, assign, and schedule tasks. ☒Con: Planner specific. No tracking by project or ability to add custom fields.
  • To Do – ☑Pro: Easy to use. ☒Con: Person specific. No tracking by project and no ability to add custom fields.
  • Outlook Tasks – ☑Pro: Create tasks right inside Outlook. ☒Con: Tasks are localized to Outlook. No tracking by project or adding custom fields.
  • Lists – ☑Pro: Flexibility to create custom columns. ☒Con: Resides in a single SharePoint site (although you can also access with the Lists app).
  • MS Project – ☑Pro: Project-specific tracking and scheduling. ☒Con: Additional licensing and increased complexity.

The good news is that Microsoft has been hard at work trying to integrate these applications together and even changing the new Planner logo. They recently replaced Outlook tasks with To Do, and now they have consolidated Planner, To-do, and Project into one solution.

New Microsoft Planner Plans

New Microsoft Planner Features

The new Microsoft Planner comes in two flavors:

  • Planner Basic for Microsoft 365 is included in most Microsoft 365 subscriptions at no additional cost.
  • Premium Planner is a different license, which is essentially a Project Plan 1 or 3 license with Plan 3 including a future Copilot feature.
Microsoft Planner Features by License

So, what else can this new Planner do?

New Planner templates – Microsoft is providing new templates to help you create the perfect plan. The plans indicate Basic vs. Premium, so you know which ones will require additional licensing. I tried the new Premium Commercial Construction template, and it automatically built out a Plan and a schedule with durations and logic in MS Project as well.

Planner Commercial Construction Project
Microsoft Project Commercial Construction Project

Pin a plan – You can pin a plan, so you don’t have to hunt and peck to try and find amongst all of your other plans.

Source of task – You can see where the task was created (e.g., To Do). Also, if a high-priority task is assigned to an Outlook email, a task will automatically be created and will be filtered in the Flagged Emails view.

My Day – Displays all of the tasks that are assigned to you and due today across all plans. Also includes new filters for finding tasks by keyword, due date, and priority.

Manage Your Project Tasks Your Way

Construction Viz Task Managers lets you manage your project tasks the way you want with scheduling, labor tracking, links to other construction applications, and more. Learn More >

My Tasks – Displays all of the tasks that are assigned to you across all plans. You can also filter by Private Tasks that you created, Assigned to Me tasks, and Flagged Emails. Also included are new filters for finding tasks by keyword, due dates, and priority.

Planner_5

The new Planner app brings together several task management applications in a single location and offers many new features. Microsoft is rolling out the updated Planner in early 2024. What are your thoughts on the new Planner app? What features are you looking for?

If you are looking for help implementing Planner, Microsoft Project, or any Microsoft 365 features, you can request a free one-hour consultation using the contact form below.

If you need a turnkey construction management solution for your Microsoft 365 that is customizable to your unique needs, you can request a demo of Construction Viz.

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Keep Your Construction Data Safe with Microsoft 365 Permissions – Part 1 

Microsoft News |

The process of granting permissions in Microsoft 365 seems straightforward. Most users are familiar with Microsoft's three default permission groups: owners, members, and visitors. These three permission roles simplify permission management, but do you understand what those access levels mean? And what if you need more control over who can do what on your projects? Read on to learn how Microsoft 365 structures permissions and how to manage permissions for your construction projects effectively. 

Microsoft 365 consists of several layers of permission management. In this article, we will discuss the following two: 

  1. Microsoft 365 Admin roles
  2. Application specific roles 

In our upcoming installments in the series, we will cover SharePoint permission levels, groups, and sharing. 

Microsoft Admin roles

Admin roles are assigned from the Microsoft 365 admin center. There are many administrative roles, such as billing, licensing, and Office Apps. Most construction organizations already have a Microsoft 365 tenant administrator overseeing the administration duties. However, suppose you want separate users responsible for SharePoint or Teams administration. In that case, you must assign those admin roles to those users.

Microsoft 365 Admin center permission roles filtered for SharePoint

SharePoint Admin: This permission role would be needed if the user plans on creating/deleting SharePoint site collections and modifying their settings. This role allows the admin ability to:

  • Create and delete site collections. Note: a non-Admin can still indirectly create SharePoint sites, but they are associated with an application (e.g., Teams, Planner, etc.).
  • Manage site collections and global SharePoint settings.

Application Permissions

Each application in Microsoft 365 has some level of permissions or sharing that follows a somewhat consistent pattern. The three common roles you will find in most Microsoft 365 applications are:  

  • Owner – Typically allows users to create, edit, and delete artifacts (sites, plans, teams, etc.) and records. This role also can add and assign users/permissions and manage site-scoped features. 
  • Member – Allows users to create, edit, and delete records. A record could be a document or a line item in a SharePoint list. 
  • Visitor/Guest – Allows users to view records. They cannot add or delete records. 

An example of these roles in Microsoft Teams is below:

Permission roles in Teams
  • Owner - Team owners manage specific settings for the team. They add and remove members and guests, change team settings, and handle administrative tasks. There can be multiple owners in a team. 
  • Members - Members are the people in the team. They talk with other team members in conversations. They can view, upload, and change files. They also do the usual collaboration that the team owners have permitted. 
  • Guests - Guests are people from outside your organization that a team owner invites, such as partners or consultants, to join the team. Guests have fewer capabilities than team members or owners, but there's still much they can do. 

Next up: SharePoint Permissions

The basics of assigning permissions are simple, but what if you want to change or make permissions more granular?  

At the core of most Microsoft 365 applications is SharePoint. Data created in applications like Microsoft Teams is stored in SharePoint-named sites. So, when you create a new team, a SharePoint site is created automatically associated with the team. The same goes for Microsoft Planner when you create a plan. Microsoft Lists saves your lists to SharePoint based on the site you select. So, to modify permissions, you need to understand SharePoint permissions. We will cover SharePoint permissions in our next article. 

Meanwhile, contact us for a free one-hour consultation if you need help with Microsoft 365 permissions or setup. If you need a turnkey construction management solution for Microsoft 365, you can request a demo of Construction Viz. 

Microsoft Planner vs. Project: Which Should You Use for Team Tasks? 

Microsoft News |

Microsoft offers two similar products in Microsoft 365 for managing team tasks. Which one will work best for your needs? Read on to discover the pros and cons of Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project. 

icon_planner

Microsoft Planner

Microsoft Planner helps teams organize their work visually. Users create a plan that can include grid, board, chart, and schedule views to manage tasks, with file attachments stored in SharePoint Online. Each view provides different insights into managing tasks: 

  • Grid view - displays tasks assignable to team members in a log view. 
  • Board view – provides a Kanban view that organizes tasks into buckets such as status. Users can drag and drop tasks between team members and statuses. 
  • Charts - provides several graphs displaying the progress of your tasks. 
  • Schedule - shows a calendar view of your tasks by due date.  

Microsoft Planner Pros

  • Plans are typically created from Microsoft Teams, which makes setup easy.  
  • There are Planner templates available so you can hit the ground running. 
  • The user interface and process to manage tasks are intuitive. 
  • Microsoft 365 subscriptions include Planner, so there is no additional cost. 

Microsoft Planner Cons

  • Plans in Planner do not relate to “projects.” Instead, you can create plans in the app with a project name or from a team within Microsoft Teams with a project title, but Microsoft Planner is otherwise a stand-alone task-tracking application. 
  • There is no Planner rollup to see tasks across multiple plans. 

You can learn more about the app on the Microsoft Planner learning and support page. Or you can access Microsoft Planner on the web here if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription. 

icon_ms-project-sm

Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project has two versions: Project for the Web (PFTW) and Project Web App (PWA). Check out this article to find out more about these two products. Since PFTW focuses more on task management and is the modern version of Project, we will compare this product to Microsoft Planner.  

When you sign into PFTW, you can create a new project or a roadmap. PFTW stores data in the Microsoft Dataverse as opposed to SharePoint (where Planner stores its data).  

A project in PFTW includes the following views: 

  • Grid – allows you to create a task, assign team members, add schedule information such as start date and duration, update % complete, calculate effort, define dependencies such as start to finish, and add custom columns. 
  • Board - provides a Kanban view that organizes tasks into buckets such as status. Users can drag and drop tasks between team members and statuses. 
  • Timeline – displays the traditional Gantt chart view where users drag and drop dependencies and update tasks from the bars. 
  • Charts - provides several graphs displaying the progress of your tasks 
  • People – shows a Kanban view by team members for managing the status of their tasks. 
  • Goals – provides a way to organize tasks into specific goals. 
  • Assignments – gives a view of team members’ tasks and their hours of effort planned and expended. 
  • Roadmap – shows one or more project tasks in a Timeline view. 

Microsoft Project Pros

  • Tasks reside in projects, giving you a consolidated view of multiple projects in the roadmap view. 
  • You can create projects or roadmaps from within Teams, making setting up easy. 
  • Custom columns can be added to projects to define and categorize tasks further. 
  • Dependencies are available so that you can add logic between tasks. 
  • Managing team resources and level of effort across tasks is easy and intuitive.   

Microsoft Project Cons

  • Microsoft Project might have too much functionality depending on the level of detail and controls you use to track tasks. 
  • PFTW is an additional cost to your Microsoft 365 subscription. 

Final Thoughts on Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project

Cost, quality, and time to market are all factors when evaluating products or services. If we use this criteria to compare and contrast Microsoft Planner vs. Microsoft Project, here’s how they stack up: 

  • Cost – Microsoft Planner is free 
  • Quality – Both products are easy-to-use modern applications. Planner focuses on task management, while PFTW includes scheduling and resource management functionality. 
  • Time to Market – Updates by Microsoft to both products have been slow. 

Summary: 

Microsoft Planner may be the best option if you are looking for a simple task management solution that solely focuses on when a task is due and who is assigned.  

Microsoft Project for the Web (PFTW) might be a better solution if you don’t mind paying more for project-specific task tracking with scheduling and resource capabilities.  

The good news is that both products have a similar UI and can be added to Microsoft Teams, so you could start with Microsoft Planner and then move to PFTW later if you need the additional horsepower. 

Let Microsoft 365 Syntex AI Read and Organize Your Construction Images for You

Microsoft News |

Photos are heavily used on construction projects to document progress, identify defects, visualize site conditions, capture safety incidents, and even celebrate milestones. Hundreds, if not thousands, of images are taken throughout a project. Once taken, those images then need to be categorized and stored. What if you could drop off images and have Microsoft 365 Syntex read your images and categorize them for you? Read on to find out more.

What is Microsoft 365 Syntex?

Microsoft 365 Syntex is an AI solution that can find, organize, and classify documents in your SharePoint libraries, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, and Exchange. Rather than clicking and manually sorting through hundreds or thousands of files, Syntex extracts, analyzes, and categorizes the data for you. Syntex can be used in many different scenarios, such as:

  • Generating repetitive business documents like contracts.
  • Extracting data from business documents using models for searching and indexing.
  • Extracting printed or handwritten text using optical character recognition (OCR) for searching and indexing.
  • Image tagging, where AI scans images and provides image tags.

In a prior post, we covered Use AI to Manage Your Construction Projects with SharePoint Syntex, where we created several AI models and extracted data from PDF files. In this article, we walk through the new image tagging feature and how it could be used with construction images.

Syntex Image Tagging Set Up

To set up image tagging, you will need to set up your Azure subscription to link to Microsoft Syntex.

Once Syntex is set up, make sure to show the image tag column in the SharePoint document library you intend to use for dropping off images.

Using Syntex to tag images

When you drop off images in a SharePoint document library, Syntex image tagging will automatically run through all of your images using AI. You can set Syntex to run on new files only or new and updated files. It can take up to 24 hours for Syntex to provide image tags to the images.

Image Tags assigned to a construction image

There are currently 37 image tags that Microsoft uses to categorize and update the image tag column. You can also add your own tags. These image tags are great for searching and filtering since they are managed metadata that can be used across sites.

Search by Image Tag filters Documents

Wrap up

Microsoft 365 Syntex is a leading-edge solution that could save project teams a ton of time in categorizing and organizing project images in the future.

Currently, the number of image tags available for Syntex to assign is very small, so its value is limited without manually adding tags. The number of image tags may increase in the future and with new AI models, you may be able to train Syntex to perform a deeper analysis of the images and extract more relevant data, such as buildings being constructed or the type of equipment being used in the image.

For now, we recommend getting familiar with how it works and keeping an eye on this space. As Syntex AI improves and the image tags available expands, this new Syntex feature could significantly benefit your projects.

To learn more about utilizing Microsoft 365 to manage your projects or need general support, you can request a free one-hour consultation here. If you are looking for a turnkey construction project management system in Microsoft 365, click here.