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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. 

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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. 

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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.

Redefining Project Permissions with Sensitivity Labels in Microsoft 365

Microsoft News |

Sensitivity labels are an entirely new way to implement permission controls in Microsoft 365. They are more powerful and easier to administer than groups and SharePoint permissions. Will sensitivity labels ultimately be the future of permissions management in Microsoft 365? Read on to find out more.

Historical Microsoft 365 permissions overview

If you are familiar with Microsoft 365 permissions, you know how complicated administering permissions can be between external and internal users or even controlling permissions for different types of information.

If you use SharePoint to store your documents, you gain additional permission controls that you can apply by user or group by site, app, folder, list, library, or even record. And with SharePoint permission levels, you have an extensive range of options to fine-tune further what specific users can do once they gain access, such as read and edit.

Administering permissions from a content location-centric mindset (i.e., where the file is stored) can become tedious depending on the number of sites and applications in play. Also, while these types of permissions prevent access to the document in SharePoint, they do not prevent someone from getting a copy of a document from an email attachment or a chat and simply downloading it locally.

What if you could apply permissions based on a type of record or the type of person interacting with the data and ensure the permissions permeate through your entire Microsoft 365 tenant?

Introducing Sensitivity Labels

Now that we covered Microsoft 365 permissions, as we all know and love, you might wonder how sensitivity labels could improve on the foundation. Here are some of the features of sensitivity labels:

  • Persistence. Because the label is stored in metadata for files and emails, it stays with the content, no matter where it’s saved or stored. The unique label identification becomes the basis for applying and enforcing policies you configure, which apply online and offline.
  • Encryption. Emails and documents can be encrypted to prevent unauthorized people from accessing the data. You can even add expiration dates.
  • Watermarks. Sensitivity label watermarks can be automatically applied to documents and emails. You can configure the watermarks to display on the documents’ header, body, and footer.
  • Microsoft Office support. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, both on the desktop and on the web, support sensitivity labels. Sensitivity labels work on Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. Users can assign sensitivity labels directly to the file as they work on them, and that metadata is saved with the file throughout Microsoft 365. Even Power BI reports can recognize sensitivity labels.

Real-world construction examples

Scenario #1. You have confidential correspondence that only the project manager and the project controls lead should be able to see. You could create a sensitivity label called Confidential and only include PMs and PCM users. You can select the sensitivity label from right within your Outlook menu. Now that email will be restricted to only PMs and PCMs.

Applying a sensitivity label to an Outlook email.

Scenario #2. You want all internal correspondence documents in a SharePoint document library to not be shared externally. You can create an internal sensitivity label, grant access to all internal company users, and then set up a default sensitivity label on the entire document library. Now when every file gets dropped off, it is automatically restricted to internal company users.

Sensitivity menu from Microsoft Word.
Sensitivity labels applied in a SharePoint document library.

Scenario #3. You want to conduct regular vendor review meetings, but you only want to include the construction contract management (CCM) team and control any access to what is discussed and shared. You can create a sensitivity label called “vendor review” and include the CCMs. Then apply the sensitivity label from Outlook and Teams when you set up the meeting. The meeting settings can consist of:

  • Who can bypass the lobby.
  • Who can present.
  • Who can record.
  • Encryption for meeting video and audio.
  • Automatically record.
  • Video watermark for screen sharing and camera streams.
  • Prevent copy of meeting chat.
  • Prevent or allow copying chat contents to the clipboard.
Sensitivity label applied to a Teams meeting

Considerations

If you are interested in utilizing sensitivity labels, there are a couple of items to consider:

  1. Sensitivity labels only work with Microsoft Office documents. It is possible to use PDFs but refer to the latest documentation on how to set it up: Microsoft Purview Information Protection support in Acrobat (adobe.com)
  2. Sensitivity labels are created and managed in the Microsoft 365 Admin center, which very few users can access.

Overall, Sensitivity Labels are very powerful tools for managing who has access to your information. They provide a different permissions vector than traditional permissions management and are much more robust across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. You can use both models simultaneously since it is not an either-or decision. I suggest trying them out for confidential documents that should not be shared externally to see how you can incorporate them into your daily work process.

If you need any help with sensitivity labels, permissions, or Microsoft 365 in general, you can request a one-hour free consultation. You can request a demo here if you are looking for an enterprise construction management solution for Microsoft 365.

The end of an era with Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013

Microsoft News |

Microsoft recently announced the end of SharePoint 2013 Enterprise Server support. The announcement brought up some nostalgia in terms of how far SharePoint has come and our appreciation for such an influential and innovative product.

Before SharePoint 2013: The start for Lydon Solutions

We started our company developing and hosting construction solutions first on SharePoint 2007 and then quickly switching to 2010 before moving our first client to production. As a new company trying to survive in the highly competitive technology sector, we encountered many challenges. I remember those late and sleepless nights. At that time, we used out-of-the-box tools like InfoPath 2007 for forms and SharePoint Designer 2010 for workflows and supplemented where possible with third-party apps. Also, we used a SharePoint hosting company where we “rented” dedicated servers. We knew we had a good idea using SharePoint for managing construction projects, and through trial and error, we willed the technology to work. It was an exciting time.

SharePoint 2010 Landing Page
SharePoint 2010 Landing Page

Success with SharePoint 2013

Fast forward a few years. Microsoft announces SharePoint 2013 and their new cloud platform Microsoft Azure. We had a decision to make: do we continue with 2010, which we were just getting familiar with, and stay with an external hosting company or make the jump to SharePoint 2013 and do our own hosting in Azure? We decided on the latter, spinning up our own data center in Azure and delivering solutions using InfoPath 2013, Designer 2013, third-party apps, and JavaScript. We now owned the entire value chain, which allowed us to provide turnkey solutions for our clients.

SharePoint 2013 was ahead of its time with the ability to configure and customize the product for any industry. It was widely adopted across the world as the leading enterprise content management solution. Everyone had it, but not everyone knew how to use it. There were no guideposts, no how-to manuals. Through trial and error, you earned your stars and stripes. There were so many interconnected switches and considerations that It was like being a mechanic working on a formula one sports car. With SharePoint 2013 and a little JavaScript, we felt empowered to build any solution we could envision. We delivered our solutions to multi-billion-dollar projects and programs for the next seven years. It was a fantastic time. At the end of 2021, we decommissioned our last instance of SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint 2013 Landing Page
SharePoint 2013 Landing Page

Gone but not forgotten

Change is in the DNA of a technology company. Technology comes and goes, and you are always chasing after what you think the future will be. For Lydon Solutions, SharePoint has always been there. While we have since moved to Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online, I will always look back with great fondness and appreciation for what SharePoint 2013 gave us.

2015 AACE Conference demo of SharePoint 2013 solution
2015 AACE Conference demo of SharePoint 2013 solution

Thank you, Microsoft.

Microsoft 365 Loop will change your work day. Are you ready?

Microsoft News |

You might be wondering what Microsoft 365 Loop is. Microsoft Loop is a little difficult to define, so let’s use a typical office work scenario. You start your work day by opening Outlook to check your email and Teams so that you can chat with your coworkers. Next, you select a file to work on, such as updating your cost report in Excel, finishing a PowerPoint presentation for senior management, or maybe creating a status report in Word.

All of the above files reside in separate applications with their own file extensions. Wouldn’t it be easier if you started your day in a freeform workspace where you could include all of those applications, and more, without needing to go anywhere else?

Microsoft Loop is the one ring to rule them all. Loop organizes your work into workspaces like books. A workspace could be a project or re-occurring meeting like a monthly status update. The app further divides Workspaces into pages (like pages within the book).

Where Loop gets interesting is the ability to turn parts of the pages into shareable components, letting you share your workspaces, pages, and components with others to get their real-time feedback. Suddenly your work day is organized like a diary with real-time interactions without the need to switch applications.

How is Microsoft Loop different than One Note?

In theory, Loop could be the next evolution of One Note. Loop adds live integrations with Office and the ability to create shareable components.

Is there something similar to Microsoft Loop on the market?

Yes, there is a software product called Notion:

"Notion is a single space where you can think, write, and plan. Capture thoughts, manage projects, or even run an entire company — and do it exactly the way you want."

The difference between Notion and Loop is the ability to integrate with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite.

Where does Microsoft Loop save data?

You would think Loop would save data in the Dataverse, but it actually saves to SharePoint. Here’s an article explaining the details - The SharePoint storage platform supports the Loop app - Components, pages, and workspaces (microsoft.com). This is great news for our Construction Viz product which deploys to SharePoint Lists and Libraries. I can see a day where we embed Loop components into Construction Viz, potentially even bi-directionally.😊

Microsoft Loop sounds great. When can I use it?

As of March 2023, Loop is still in preview and a little underwhelming since it only integrates with Outlook for the web and Teams. Still, Microsoft has done the heavy lifting, and you can see the potential of this cross-application tool.

We’ll monitor Microsoft Loop and provide updates on how construction project teams can use it in their daily workflows. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter in the footer below not to miss future updates about Loop and other technologies essential for the construction industry.

You can also schedule a no-obligation consultation to learn more about using Microsoft 365 to manage your construction projects.

How to use Microsoft Teams Updates for Construction

Microsoft News |

Microsoft has released a new Teams app called Updates. The Updates app allows you to create update requests for your teams or individuals and allow recipients to submit their response for review.

The Updates app is an interesting approach to issuing and receiving status requests for your team members from within Teams. If you want quick status updates in a questionnaire-type format, the Updates app might be a great tool to consider. Read on to find out more.

Setting up the Updates app for Microsoft Teams

Here is a quick walkthrough on setting up the Updates app.

Requirements to get started
Before you begin, you will need to have the following in place:

  • A Microsoft Dataverse If you don't have permission to create one yourself, you will need to request this from your IT team or tenant admin.
  • A Power Automate, Microsoft 365 E/M, or Dynamics license.
  • A license for Microsoft Forms.
  • An administration role in the environment.

Adding the Updates app
To add the Updates app, click on the three dots in the lefthand navigation area of Teams (it says "More added apps" when you hover) and search for Updates. You can then pin the app so you can quickly get to it in the future.

You can also create or assign an Update from within a chat by clicking the three dots (Messaging Extensions) and then searching for and selecting the Updates app.

Configuring the app
When creating an Update, you have several options. You can use an existing template, such as a weekly update or a facility inspection, or select "Start from Blank" to create a template.

If you "Start from Blank," there are three settings you can adjust:

  • Basic settings – This is where you can name the template and enable it.
  • Form design – This is where you create the questionnaire. If you are familiar with Microsoft Forms, you will see that it's pretty much the same interface with the same options.
  • Workflow settings – This is where you create the workflow of who will respond to the Update (submitters), who will be able to review responses (viewers), and what frequency the flow will run.

Submitting an update
Once an Updates template is created and saved, based on the due date of your flow, team members will receive a notification under their activity feed in Teams. Submitters can then respond in mobile and desktop versions of Teams which is handy for front-line workers.

Reviewing responses
If someone assigns you as a viewer in the update, you will have access to an Updates dashboard that provides the status of any updates you have scheduled, issued, or received. You can review all of the responses from the viewers as they arrive and view the entire series of responses in one view.

Where is this data being saved?
The Updates app stores all its data in Microsoft's Dataverse in Microsoft 365. The Dataverse has many benefits, such as deep integration with Microsoft's cloud services (Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365) and access to many connectors in Power Automate and Azure Logic Apps. Also, since Updates uses Forms to build questionnaires, all your Updates forms will show in Microsoft Forms in a read-only view.

Our overall takeaway on using the Updates app for construction

The Updates app has potential as a one-off status update solution for Microsoft Teams.

The questionnaire or survey will need to be simple and only require a one-step workflow for it to be viable for something like a construction daily progress report. If you are not collecting a lot of data from your submitters and are heavily ingrained in using Teams to manage projects, I recommend checking it out.

For more complex scenarios, you may be better off looking at a combination of Power Apps and Power Automate to give you flexibility for your form and workflow logic.

The Good

  • Prebuilt templates are available, and you can create your own.
  • You can add the Updates app to Teams chats.
  • The Updates app has a simple but effective workflow to collect responses and even schedule reoccurring requests.
  • The app's dashboard provides an easy way to manage responses.

The Bad

  • It's an app specifically for status updates which makes it a one-off tool in Teams.
  • It uses Microsoft Forms which is somewhat limited in functionality; if it were possible to connect to Power Apps, you would have much more options to build out forms.
  • The Updates app offers limited configuration options, such as creating custom views, exporting to Excel, and printing to Power BI.
  • Users cannot edit their responses after submission.
  • No customization capability.

Learn how to use Microsoft 365 to manage your construction projects

If you need help setting up Microsoft 365 to manage your construction projects, you can check out this three-part blog article series or contact us directly for a free consultation.