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Use AI to Help Manage Your Construction Projects with Microsoft SharePoint Syntex

Microsoft News |

Microsoft SharePoint Syntex is an AI tool available as an add-on for Microsoft 365 that construction organizations can use to manage project data more efficiently.

Information management is one of the biggest challenges for any organization. But in construction, it is not just about internal project information management. Compounding the problem's complexity for construction managers and owners is the additional burden of managing the flood of data that their vendors and contractors submit daily (e.g., submittals, RFIs, change orders, and invoices).

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Shortcomings of typical project data management methods

Construction organizations have typically processed and managed external project information in one of two ways:

Option 1 – Ask contractors to use the construction manager or owner's project management information system (PMIS)

This approach centralizes data, ensuring that project information resides in a single system of record for processing.

However, using this method adds significant costs and raises the risk of errors.  For example, it entails considerable effort in training and hand-holding for every contractor using the PMIS. It also often requires additional document control staff to review and correct technical and data input issues. Finally, contractors typically increase their bids to account for the redundant data entry required to support two systems.

Option 2 – Have contractors email project correspondence (usually as PDFs) to the construction manager or owner for manual entry into their PMIS

This second approach has document control specialists entering data into the system-of-record PMIS, providing a clean and centralized repository for project information.

Unfortunately, this method only shifts the burden of processing project records from the contractors to the owner or construction manager. Thus, while it improves data accuracy, there are still issues of increased cost and significant manual effort.

Using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex to automate project data management

If your organization is on Microsoft 365 and uses SharePoint for construction project management, the good news is that there is a better way to manage your data. Microsoft has recently released SharePoint Syntex, an AI tool for automating content processing.

With SharePoint Syntex, once you train your AI model to classify and extract data from PDFs, the tool will be able to take over and run on a specific document library in SharePoint. The AI model will extract metadata from a PDF document and add it to SharePoint columns once you upload new files.

What does Microsoft SharePoint Syntex mean for construction?

With SharePoint Syntex, there is now a third way to manage and process your construction project information. Using SharePoint Syntex, contractors do not have to learn a new system, nor would the owner or construction managers have to process project correspondence from the contractor manually.  Instead, contractors could email project correspondence to the owner or construction manager. A trained Syntex AI model could then review the documents and automatically classify them based on a predefined set of rules. While this may sound like science fiction, it's not, and it's available right now for SharePoint in Microsoft 365.

What does Microsoft SharePoint Syntex cost?

Syntex for SharePoint is available as a cost-per-user add-on in Microsoft 365. The pricing posted on the SharePoint Syntex pricing page at the time of this article is $5/user per month or $60/year.

How to get started using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex?

Once you pay for a SharePoint Syntex user license and create a content center in SharePoint, you can start building AI models.

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We'll get into the details in future posts on this subject and possibly some online training sessions.

Get Help Using Microsoft SharePoint Syntex to Manage Your Construction Projects

Lydon Solutions always embraces leading-edge Microsoft technology to improve construction projects' efficiency.  We have already built AI models that extract invoice data from PDF invoices emailed into a Microsoft 365 group mailbox. As soon as the file is uploaded, the AI tool automatically extracts data for reporting and analysis. It's exciting stuff!

If you have any questions about setting up SharePoint Syntex for your Microsoft 365 or need a turnkey enterprise PMIS integrated with SharePoint like Construction Viz, don't hesitate to reach out to us for a no-obligation consultation and demo. We're here to help!

What is Microsoft Project for the Web?

Microsoft News |

If you are a longtime Microsoft Project user, you probably notice that some changes are afoot with the application. Specifically, Microsoft recently introduced Microsoft Project for the Web available as a part of a Project subscription. Read on to learn more about PFTW and whether it might make sense for your organization.

Microsoft Project has a long history of providing scheduling and project management tracking to the construction industry. The first commercial version of Project was released for MS-DOS in 1984, and its development has seen it evolve into a SaaS offering through Microsoft 365. Due to Microsoft's reach, like it or not, Project has become the go-to scheduling software in construction.

As Project gets a bit long in the tooth, many competitors look to unseat the champion, and Microsoft has noticed. With Project for the Web (PFTW), Microsoft has essentially rebuilt Project from the ground up. It is a modern web app that is responsive and full of future promise.

But before you transition your organization to this new version of Project, we have compiled a list of hits and misses for the current version of Project for the Web.

Where Project for the Web hits the mark

Project for the Web has several compelling features, including:

Modern UI/UX – PFTW is a modern web app with a great UI/UX and is responsive on mobile devices with a modern browser (accessed through Teams).

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Easy to use – PFTW makes it simple for non-PM users to quickly build a schedule and start tracking tasks with little to no instruction. The program only enforces predecessor logic, so you don't need to be a scheduler to build a schedule.

Integration with other Microsoft tools – PFTW integrates into the Microsoft 365 suite of apps with a particular focus on the Power Platform. Also, PFTW stores data in the Dataverse instead of locally or via SharePoint lists like Project Web App. The Dataverse offers the future promise of having a universal database across all Microsoft 365 apps. Pretty exciting stuff!

You can learn more about using the tool on Microsoft's Project for the Web getting started page.

Areas where Project for the Web misses

In its current form, Project for the Web does miss the mark in a few ways:

Lacks functionality - PFTW lacks most of the features you find in Microsoft Project Web App and Project Professional. The tool strictly focuses on scheduling and managing tasks rather than activities. It excludes resource and cost management and relies on the Power Platform to supplement the application. Think of PFTW as a version of Microsoft Planner with a Gantt Chart.

No backward compatibility and integration with other versions of Project – PFTW is currently separate from the Project we all know. The tool doesn't integrate with Project Web App, so you cannot move between the two. Wherever you start your project, you will be stuck in that application. Also, PFTW doesn't integrate with the desktop version of Project, where you can do robust scheduling and resources and cost management.

Different data store – PFTW data resides in the Dataverse, which long term, aligns with Microsoft's strategy of embedding metadata, tables, and security into the apps. The future benefits will be significant, but right now, it seems odd. Project Web App data, on the other hand, is stored in SharePoint task lists. So we are left with this strange storage issue between PFTW and Project Web App. Also, Project Web App uses classic SharePoint sites to store data which Microsoft seems to be deprecating in favor of modern sites.  Meanwhile, there are no web parts for PFTW and tasks in the modern SharePoint sites, meaning there is no out-of-the-box way of displaying your project schedule on your sites. For your team to see your project schedules, users either go to PFTW directly or access the data through Teams (once they download the PFTW app).

As you can see above, PFTW is a much more modern application and a step in the right direction for Project. But, at this time, there are many challenges for using PFTW as a construction project management solution. Also, note that Microsoft's roadmap for Project is pretty sparse as well.

Given all the above, most teams are probably better sticking with Project Web App for now. But keep an eye on PFTW as the tool continues to mature and gain features.

Want to manage your construction projects in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint?

Lydon Solutions has been developing construction management solutions in Microsoft SharePoint since 2009 and Microsoft 365 since 2013. 

If your company is looking to take full advantage of the Microsoft 365 suite of services for your construction organization, check out our managed services offering. If you need a turnkey enterprise construction management solution in Microsoft 365, check out Construction Viz.  

Keeping you on track with Microsoft To Do

Microsoft News |

If your organization has transitioned to Microsoft 365, you are probably surprised at how many task management applications there are. From Planner to Outlook, each one has its own task management functionality for assigning tasks and alerting users when they need to take an action. What separates Microsoft To Do from the pack is the pure simplicity of the tool, its ability to focus on your specific tasks in an easy-to-use UI and having its own dedicated app available across devices. But To Do is much more than a simple task management app and Microsoft has bigger plans for To Do in the future. Read on to see what makes To Do so great and how it can be used in the construction industry.

First a little bit of history.

Microsoft bought Wunderlist in 2015 and subsequently retired it in 2020. Wunderlist was a great task management application that worked across OS devices from Android to even a Windows Phone. This Wunderlist acquisition gave Microsoft an "in" across OSs, an already established user base, and fit in nicely to Microsoft's broader app strategy for gaining traction on mobile devices. In the two years following the acquisition, Microsoft released its own task management application, To Do. Clearly, Microsoft learned from what worked and what didn't with Wunderlist and built their own task management tool that was more integrated with Microsoft 365. At the start, critics were harsh on To Do, as the tech was still being developed, but it has now evolved into a concrete task management product for users.

What makes To Do so great and how can I use it for construction?

Microsoft To Do:

• Is free. To Do is free with a Microsoft 365 subscription.
• Offers a single task management location. All your specific tasks across the suite of Microsoft 365 applications can integrate with To Do using Power Automate, the Microsoft workflow engine. So, while the tasks could be created in other Microsoft 365 applications, they can then be surfaced for the individual user to manage in their To Do application.
• Is an app that you can download to any device. To Do is an app that can be installed on any device so you can use online or offline for managing your task as you transition from the field to the office. Also, with a recent update, To Do will support push notifications on shared list activities.
• Offers a robust API. Microsoft released a new To Do Application Programming Interface (API). This allows other applications, including Microsoft Graph to integrate with To Do. So, if you have a PMIS (Project Management Information System) to manage your projects, you could use the APIs to connect tasks from other applications and systems with To Do. You would then manage your team tasks in your PMIS and let users manage their own tasks in To Do.
• Allows users to create and share task lists. You can create a task list in To Do, share with team members, and assign tasks to your team. The To Do task list resides in To Do and is managed by the owner of the list.

Are there any considerations to be made aware of?

While To Do is an excellent tool for user-specific Task Management, there are a few things to consider.

• Which Microsoft 365 task management tool should I use? Organizations need to evaluate the best software application to manage tasks. Microsoft 365 comes with many different task management applications. Outlook has its own ‘My Task’ functionality, the new Lists app for Teams may also be used as a task management tool, Planner has Plans for team task management (check out our Planner post), SharePoint has its own issue tracker, Microsoft Project tracks tasks in a Gantt chart, and you can also track tasks in One Note.
• To Do is not a consolidated task management solution. Since To Do is a user-specific task management application, you are unable to view all your team member’s tasks in one place unless you created the shared To Do task list.
• Its data is not available in Power BI. As of now, To Do data is not available for Power BI, so you would have to look for a third-party tool to provide that reporting. Another option would be to build a Power Automate workflow to send the data to a SharePoint list and then use that list to report against.

Task management is fundamentally at the core of most systems and most likely will not be replaced with another task management solution. With all the applications across the enterprise, users could easily be overwhelmed with having to log into those systems to update the status of their tasks. Separating creating a task, in the system of record, from the user disposition of their tasks with To Do, makes complete sense and could be a shift in your day-to-day work behavior. We will see where To Do fits as adoption increases with more companies transitioning to Microsoft 365.

Overall, To Do is a solid user-specific task management application, like most Microsoft products, it will continue to become more robust with new features over time.

Get Project Management Expertise from Lydon Solutions

Need help with Microsoft 365 for your construction organization? Check out our managed services and sign up for a free consultation. Or if you are interested in a prebuilt enterprise-ready PMIS for your Microsoft 365, learn more about Construction Viz.

Is Microsoft Yammer a Fit for Your Business?

Microsoft News |

Microsoft Yammer is an enterprise social networking service in Microsoft 365 for internal communications within organizations. Think of it like Facebook, but for your company. Read on to learn more about this communication tool and how you can best use it at your organization.

Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 for $1.2B when the frenzy around social media was taking off. The thought was this technology would change how employees would communicate and collaborate across the enterprise. Fast forward eight years, and Microsoft Yammer is still a little-known Microsoft 365 service, at least among construction organizations.

In my opinion, the reason Yammer has not had mass appeal or adoption has nothing to do with the technology lacking. Quite the opposite, the service is very robust and wholly integrated across Microsoft 365. Yammer provides a range of open APIs for integration, many plugins, and options for importing and exporting information. It also offers role-based permissions control as well as to-do lists.

The issue is more with a lack of understanding of what Yammer is and how it differentiates itself from other Microsoft 365 applications. Specifically, two Microsoft acquisitions appear to be in direct competition with Yammer: Skype and Teams.

Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5B. Both consumers and businesses use Skype for video and voice calls, as well as instant messaging. Many companies use Skype for Business (the precursor to Teams) as their primary messaging app, perceiving it to be like Yammer conversations (the core feature of Yammer). With the release of Teams, Microsoft is deprecating Skype for Business in favor of this new universal communications app. Teams also includes chat functionality and is fast becoming the “go-to for everything” application in Microsoft 365.

What Are the Best Features of Microsoft Yammer?

Yammer provides an organized way of communicating with your organization as a whole. You can create conversation (chat) groups for team members to participate in addition to private messages. It allows you to share files from SharePoint Online or those uploaded from your computer. You can create questions, polls, announcements, live events, and even publicly praise your group members. It is, in other words, a very well-designed communications tool. But what stands out for me is Yammer’s ability to easily organize, search, and share all these conversations across your organization. It promises to keep engagement high and conversations flowing.

Ideal uses for Yammer include:

  • Delivering company training sessions
  • Distributing organizational announcements
  • Listing lessons learned
  • Capturing employee suggestions

For construction organizations specifically, you might want to use Yammer as a project-centric chat application because of its robust search and retention capabilities. You could also take advantage of Yammer as an announcement area for project progress and critical milestones, safety goals, value engineering ideas, safety training, and team-building events.

How Does Yammer Fit into the Future of Microsoft 365?

Teams continues to grow in popularity and reach. More and more functionality that was only in Yammer is starting to make its way into Teams. So could Yammer be wholly absorbed into Teams?  I don’t think so because there are some use cases that Yammer addresses that Teams does not. For example, messages in Teams (even public ones) are not searchable or discoverable until you join a team first, making them virtually invisible to non-members. Also, there is no tenant-wide discovery feature for popular or trending conversations in Teams, and even org-wide teams have significant membership limits for many organizations. Not even the new modern SharePoint Communications sites deliver the power of the Yammer conversation model.

I talked about how to select between the various Microsoft 365 collaboration tools in a previous blog post. As I explained, Microsoft structures collaboration in Microsoft 365 around “Loops,” with each application serving a specific communication purpose. If you look at the collaboration applications in Microsoft 365, you can start to see why a user might want to use one tool over the other depending on how you approach your work:

  • Content-centric – SharePoint
  • Organized team-centric – Teams
  • Task-centric – Planner
  • Conversation-centric - Yammer

Ultimately, all of these apps could come together into one collaborative platform, like Teams or SharePoint, but Microsoft announced a new Yammer at the end of 2019; it is the most significant update to Yammer since it launched ten years ago.

The new Yammer, now in public preview as of June 2020, boasts a thorough overhaul of the product. Communities replace Groups. The user interface is fresh and uncluttered, and there are plenty of new features too, such as pinned posts, conversations that can be closed, and the ability to push notifications for polls, praise, and question posts. There are revamped mobile apps for iOS and Android and a new app for Microsoft Teams, called Communities, that brings the full Yammer experience into Teams.

I encourage you to try Yammer out and see if it fits with the other applications you are currently using in Microsoft 365.

Do More with Microsoft 365

Lydon Solutions offers a full range of managed services for Microsoft 365, helping organizations implement and take advantage of everything the productivity platform provides.

If you would like a fully featured Project Management Information System (PMIS) that supports Microsoft 365, check out our flexible Construction Viz solution. You can sign up for a no-obligation consultation and demo today.

Microsoft Power BI and Paginated Reports for Construction

Microsoft News |

As your construction organization moves to Microsoft 365, the question of how to report on all your data becomes critical. Microsoft 365’s de facto reporting solution is Power BI. It is the one-stop-shop for reporting on data generated in Microsoft’s expansive cloud platform as well as external applications.

Microsoft Power BI is known as a robust dashboard report builder. It can connect to many different data sets and applications to build stunning dashboards and KPIs that can be displayed on any device. Microsoft continually enhances Power BI with functionality and integration capabilities and puts that power in the hands of the users. This helps to make it a prime reporting solution on the market today.

While Power BI can publish SQL Server paginated reports, it did not provide the option to create paginated reports until recently when Microsoft released a new desktop Power BI Report application.

So, What are Paginated Reports and How Would I Use Them in Construction?

Paginated reports can be extensively formatted, can fit one or more pages, and are designed to be easily printed. In construction, they are great for printing a formatted form (eg. Submittal Form):

Or data logs with multiple pages (eg. Submittal Log):

Get Started with Power BI and Create Paginated Reports

To get started with creating paginated reports in Power BI, you will need a Power BI Premium license and you must download and install the Power BI Report Builder software. Please be aware that Power BI Premium is expensive. Before you consider Power BI for paginated reports, we recommend reaching out to Microsoft to understand licensing requirements. There are also some settings required in your Power BI service that will be needed. We would recommend doing an internet search on Microsoft Power BI Paginated Reports for step by step instructions as these might change.

See Microsoft’s FAQs for Power BI Paginated Reports for more information.

Lastly, to build effective reports, you will need to have a good understanding of where your information (ie. data sets) resides in your topography. We would recommend that you start mapping out your data sets sooner rather than later to ensure power users all create reports using the same structured data.

Get Reporting Expertise from Lydon Solutions

Having the ability to create paginated reports in Power BI is a great feature. Lydon Solutions has been building SQL Server Reports (SSRS) and Power BI reports for construction for many years. If you have any questions or need help building SQL Server or Power BI reports, you can get a free consultation to talk with our team of experts. If you need an enterprise construction management PMIS that can be deployed into Microsoft 365, complete with reporting, or get a demo of our easy-to-use project management software solution, Construction Viz.

Which Microsoft 365 Collaboration App Should I Use?

Microsoft News |

Microsoft 365 provides a unified environment for collaboration and teamwork. All services are managed under the same framework and identity management solution.

While there are many different Microsoft 365 applications available to users, some providing similar collaboration capabilities, it can be confusing as to which ones are best for your project. To help eliminate some of the confusion, Microsoft published an article explaining how information is organized by Loops, including the recommended applications. Below is the Microsoft Loops diagram:

Identifying Tools for Collaboration – Microsoft Loops and Office 365 Groups


Inner loop. Targeted for interactions and collaboration between close knit teams. This loop is the day-to-day communication between team members working on a project.

• Teams. Teams provides communication (chat, VOIP, webinars, meetings), file sharing (where users can share and edit Microsoft Office applications in real time), and a centralized portal for collaboration across Microsoft 365 applications. It is fast becoming the go-to project management application in Microsoft 365 that brings all other applications together into a unified platform.

Outer loop. Targeted for conversations and discovery within the broader audience. This loop is for communicating within the entire organization. This includes company or organizational communities, meetings, training, and lessons learned.

• Yammer. Yammer is like a Facebook for your business. It provides a way to reach out and connect to your organization by posting questions, announcements, articles, news, blogs, videos, polls, and even praise for your employees or co-workers. While Teams has its own chat functionality, Yammer takes it to another level with the ability to create communities and search posts- which are currently not available in Teams. While there are many companies using Yammer, most of its functionality continues to be added to Teams. This could potentially lead to it being completely absorbed by Teams in the future.

Email. Personal method for communicating with another party electronically. It has been, and will continue to be, the preferred method of communication on projects.

• Outlook. Outlook is one of the largest email clients in existence and is designed for personal information management including webmail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks. Outlook is the De facto standard for how a business communicates in Microsoft 365- especially between internal and external team members.

Files, Sites, and Content. Every collaborative application in Microsoft 365 consists of Files (Microsoft Office application files such as Word and Excel) Sites (for organizing files and sharing your data) and Content (any other file types such as images, video, and other non-Microsoft Office 365 applications).

• SharePoint. SharePoint is the #1 Enterprise Content Management System in the world. All of your project content can be created, edited, stored, and shared in SharePoint. SharePoint is at the core of all Microsoft 365 applications – Teams, Yammer, Project, and Planner. Every time you create a team or a project, a site collection is automatically created in SharePoint. Think of SharePoint as the backend database where all applications integrate with each other. So if you prefer SharePoint over Teams or Yammer, it can be used as both the Inner and Outer loop and vice versa.

Office 365 Groups. Since there can be many site collections created from all of the Microsoft 365 applications, there needed to be a way to bring all of them together for access management. Office 365 Groups associate users across applications and automatically create outlook mailboxes. Combining Office 365 Groups with SharePoint Hub sites completes the access and navigation across these disparate site collections.  Here's a link to a previous post explaining Office 365 Groups.

Planner and Project. What about Planner and Project? Both applications seem to be a part of the Inner Loop, and while they are very much collaborative, they seem to be more task and activity management centric than the central hub for collaboration on your projects like Teams or SharePoint.

Discover Project Management and Organization in Microsoft 365

We hope this article helps provide some guidance when it comes to Microsoft 365 applications that you may use but have not had the chance to fully explore. If you have any questions or are looking to setup your construction project organizations in Microsoft 365, check out our Microsoft 365 Managed Services and submit a free consultation request.

Looking for more of a turnkey, enterprise-ready Project Management Information System (PMIS) for Microsoft 365? Check out Construction Viz and submit a request for a free demo.