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Microsoft Tips

Use Microsoft 365 Groups for a Project Email Inbox

Microsoft Tips |

A frequent request from construction organizations using Microsoft 365 is how they can get a project email inbox. Check out this article to find out how Microsoft 365 Groups can address the need and so much more.  

Microsoft replaced SharePoint site email inboxes a while back with Microsoft 365 Groups. A Microsoft 365 Group is an access group for SharePoint and Outlook, Planner, OneNote, Power BI, Viva Engage, Teams, Stream, and other applications within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Creating and accessing a Microsoft 365 Group

You can create a Microsoft 365 Group in the admin center. Also creating a SharePoint site will automatically create a Microsoft 365 Group:

  • The group is named after the SharePoint site and automatically includes an email address.
  • When you add members or owners from a modern SharePoint site, they are added to the group.
  • If you are added to a group, you will see the email inbox in Outlook under the groups heading.
  • You can also access the email inbox from the SharePoint conversations quick menu.

As the owner of the group, you can further control who has access, add visitors, enable whether people outside of the organization can email the team, allow sending CC emails to group member email addresses, and elect not to show the group in Outlook.

Groups have many functions beyond having an email address. If you want to find out how Microsoft 365 Groups can help you manage your construction projects, require general Microsoft 365 support, or need a construction management solution for Microsoft 365, you can request a free 1-hour consultation below.

Check out ConstructionViz.com for our turnkey construction project management solution powered by Microsoft 365.

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Always Find What You Need With SharePoint Favorites

Microsoft Tips |

Over the years, SharePoint has evolved into the place to do everything in Microsoft 365. But with the impressive list of features also comes complexity. For example, there are 20 options in the documents menu list, not including sub-menus. It is intuitive if you are an experienced SharePoint user, but it can be overwhelming for the non-tech-savvy field user. Fortunately, some shortcuts, like SharePoint favorites, can help you on your next construction project. Check out this article to find out more.

Favorites are a key feature often overlooked but can really help project teams find what they need.

SharePoint Site Favorites

For starters, when you create a new SharePoint site, it can sometimes be challenging trying to find it. If the site is one you frequently use, follow it so that it displays in the Following grouping on the Microsoft 365 SharePoint landing page. You can follow a site by clicking on the star at the top right of the card or clicking the following star once you navigate to the site's home page.

SharePoint Document Favorites

Finding documents is the #1 challenge for field workers in SharePoint. Do they use search, navigate to different sites, open folders, filter document views, or all of the above? Favorites might be a great option if they frequently use the same files.

In the document menu for a specific file, you can select Favorite, which will tag the file and add it to your Favorite menu in One Drive Online. Yeah, kinda odd place, but if field users make all of their key files into Favorites, they can access One Drive directly instead of multiple SharePoint sites. Also, the files will show in the OneDrive mobile app and the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app if you have them installed on your mobile device.

SharePoint Site Pages Favorites

If your IT team is familiar with SharePoint, they will most likely have more than one site page within SharePoint sites. The purpose of site pages is to display information differently for different audiences within the same site. So, if you have access to the site pages, you can also make them Favorites. This feature is interesting because SharePoint .aspx pages will also be displayed in OneDrive Online, which could make navigation more manageable for the field user.

Microsoft SharePoint for Construction Project Management

Want help managing your construction projects with Microsoft 365? Lydon Solutions has in-depth experience providing solutions for the construction industry on Microsoft 365. 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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You Built It. Now Make Sure They Come: SharePoint Site Usage Analytics

Microsoft Tips |

Microsoft 365 SharePoint data sprawl is common across construction organizations, especially if project teams are given carte blanche permission to create their own sites. Fortunately, Microsoft has provided SharePoint site analytics to gain insight into whether sites are being used. Check out this article to see how SharePoint site analytics works and how the reports might help your organization get the most out of SharePoint.

A significant pro and con of SharePoint is how straightforward and quick it is to create sites. Because of this, IT departments often grant SharePoint admin permissions to project teams to add and develop sites on their own, often without guidance. Before you know it, hundreds of sites are loose in the wild. And once the genie is out of the bottle, it is challenging for IT departments to control the ensuing data sprawl.

How to Get SharePoint Site Usage Reports

To help get the most out of SharePoint and possibly reduce the number of sites, Microsoft includes site usage reports to understand how the sites are being used. You can access the reporting from the site settings by clicking Site Usage.

Note the following considerations:

  • Site admins, owners, members, and visitors can view site usage data.
  • Site visitors cannot run external user reports or download the 90-day usage report.
  • Guest users with Site Owner permissions will not have access to site analytics or site usage data.

Available SharePoint Site Usage Report Dashboards

There are many valuable dashboards available in the site usage reports that provide 7, 30, and 90-day windows of site usage data.

Overall Traffic

Unique viewers
This dashboard provides the number of unique viewers of your site regardless of how often they visit it. So, if you want to see if the entire project team has at least accessed a site, this report will be beneficial.

Site visits
Site visits provide the total number of visits to pages, documents, and news. This dashboard lets you see how often users visit the site. If they haven't visited the site for over 90 days and the project is closed, it might be a good candidate for deletion or archiving.

Average time spent per user
The average time spent per user report shows the trend of actual time spent on modern SharePoint site pages and news posts by users. The report calculates when users are active on the page or news post, not counting when the page is minimized or when the user has the page open but is inactive.

This report might provide insight into whether the site is compelling enough to keep users engaged. If there are many viewers but they don't spend much time on the site, it might warrant a redesign of the site for more interactivity or rethink what type of content is provided.

Popular content in the last 7 days.

These dashboards provide insights into the number of unique viewers, visits, and time spent across Site Pages, News, and Documents.

Note the following considerations:

  • Guest and anonymous views and visits are included for sites after March 2019.
  • User activity reflected in the report will not include usage data collected in the last 60 minutes.
  • When a third-party tool is used to render PDF files from a SharePoint Online library, these views are not recorded, nor are they reflected in the file view statistics in the audit log.
  • Files such as .jpg, .gif, .jpeg, .png, and .svg are excluded from the reports.

Usage insights

Usage insights are a more granular view of usage by device and the time of the day.

By Device
This dashboard shows the percentage of time spent on desktops, mobile web, mobile apps, tablets, and other devices over 7, 30, or 90 days.

Suppose you built the site for field use, but don't see any mobile usage. That might mean that users are forced to go into the office to access the site instead of remotely in the field where the work is being done. As a result, a different mobile approach might be warranted, such as using the OneDrive mobile app, Power Apps, or the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app.

By Time
The by-time report shows the hourly trend of visits to the site over the last 7 days, 30 days, and 90 days for the viewer's local time zone. Darker shades on the chart refer to time slots when there are more views of the content on the site. This chart may be helpful if you want to target the ideal day and time for news or announcements to your teams.

Shared with External Users
This report provides a list of files you can access that have been shared outside your organization. The report is an Excel export that where you can choose where to save the file when you run the report. The report is handy if you want to monitor external sharing and analyze whether the approach to sharing is optimal, considering how the sites and libraries have been organized.

Final Thoughts

The SharePoint site usage reports are an excellent but often overlooked feature for gaining better insights into how your sites are being accessed and used. They provide a tool to support further investment in developing new site features or deleting a site to shrink the footprint and overall file storage.

If you are still brainstorming on how to structure your SharePoint sites to be the most effective for your project teams and have some questions, you can reach out for a free one-hour consultation here. We are always happy to help.

If you want a turnkey construction management solution for Microsoft 365, check out Construction Viz and request a demo here.

How to Manage Construction Project Photos in SharePoint

Microsoft Tips |

Microsoft SharePoint 365 is the leading content management system in the world, full stop. Many features make it an excellent construction management tool; the most widely used feature is the ability to manage files. One of the challenges in construction is finding an easy way to store project photos and retrieve the images throughout the lifecycle of a project. Check out this article to discover your options for managing construction project photos in SharePoint.

Construction Project Photos in SharePoint

Back in the day, SharePoint included a Picture Library app that allowed images to be displayed as thumbnails and captured location information. Microsoft has since deprecated that app in favor of standard document libraries to store pictures.

So, what does that mean for uploading and finding your photos?

  • Location information stored as metadata is not available in an out-of-the-box document library. You could add a location column to the library, manually enter an address or lat/long, or use a Power Automate workflow to generate a location.
  • Image thumbnails are not part of the default documents view. You will need to switch to or create a new view to use tiles. Note: Tiles are not available to select from if you create a view from within the library settings. Creating a tiles view is only possible from the view settings directly on the document list.
  • Uploading images to SharePoint directly might be cumbersome. If you need to bookmark multiple SharePoint sites to upload your project photos, adding a shortcut to OneDrive from the SharePoint document library might make sense. This option will create a new connection that is accessible online and offline to the same SharePoint document library but from OneDrive or Windows File Explorer. Check out the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app for another approach to taking photos and uploading them to SharePoint.
  • You will most likely need folders or metadata to organize and search images. You can create folders in SharePoint or OneDrive or create columns with unique metadata in SharePoint. Read this article to better understand Folders vs. Columns in SharePoint. Also, Copilot AI has some interesting capabilities for extracting data from images, which we will discuss in future articles.

So, if you are looking to use SharePoint to store your project photos, you will want to leverage the tile view, decide where and how you want to access them, and whether metadata is appropriate for you.

To get a better experience capturing photos in the field you might want to evaluate Microsoft’s mobile apps. There is a Microsoft 365 SharePoint mobile app that is available for your mobile device that you can download here. If you are looking to leverage related Microsoft 365 apps while in the field to capture photos, you might want to install the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app which consolidates all of Microsoft’s mobile apps under one application and includes some image manipulation features as well as Copilot AI. You can download the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app here.  You can find out more about the app in our latest blog here.

If you are looking for a holistic approach to managing your construction projects, you can sign up for a free one-hour consultation here. Lydon Solutions works with construction companies, organizations, and projects of all sizes to help them maximize their investment in Microsoft 365.

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Take Project Photos in the Field Using the Microsoft 365 Copilot App!

Microsoft Tips |

Contractors on construction projects often use Microsoft OneDrive to upload project photos on their mobile devices while in the field. While the experience of uploading pictures to folders is straightforward, there is a little-known mobile app called Microsoft 365 Copilot that can provide some cool features to the experience. Check out this article to find out more.

The New Microsoft 365 App Name

Microsoft has recently renamed Microsoft 365 to Microsoft 365 Copilot across the web (office.com) and mobile app. Yes, it is getting a little confusing because Copilot is their AI tool, but it’s still the same Microsoft 365 with a different name and more focus on AI.

What is the Microsoft 365 Copilot App for Mobile?

Now that we have the name change out of the way, the Microsoft 365 Copilot app for mobile is actually the one app that rules them all from Microsoft.

While you can individually install each app like SharePoint, OneDrive, Power Apps, etc., the Microsoft 365 Copilot app provides a modern UI to access all of these apps and provide new features all under one hood. I wrote about it in detail in our Microsoft 365 for Construction newsletter.

For project photos specifically, there are a couple of nice features in the mobile app:

Photo Features in Microsoft OneDrive Tab

The OneDrive tab is a clean and easy-to-use UI that allows you to access your OneDrive files. View your files and navigate to specific OneDrive libraries. Other features include sharing files, making a file a favorite, keeping files offline on the device, renaming a file, deleting a file, and removing it from the list.

Also, there is a summary view of your files and the ability to search Microsoft Teams document libraries that you can access, which is pretty slick.

You can upload files into the libraries as well. You can even let the app manage files on your phone outside of Microsoft 365.

So, if you want to save your photos easily to OneDrive, you can upload them from this tab.

Photo Features in Microsoft Capture

You can take a photo and edit it before uploading it to OneDrive. Capture is a lightweight tool to scan and extract data from images, videos, and dictation.

  • Scan. You can use your camera to scan and mark up an image using a lightweight editing menu. It’s an easy-to-use way to take a photo in the field with some markup capabilities such as crop, ink, text, rotate, delete, and the ability to add filters. Once the image is ready to go, you can save it to OneDrive and include it in a daily report at a later date.
  • Extract. Extract is like scanning but it will read and extract text from an image. This feature could save some steps when typing data into Note or Word.

So, if you need to do photo editing before uploading, Capture could be your go-to app.

In summary, if you use OneDrive to store files, try the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app to see if it can enhance your project workflows.

Use Microsoft 365 to Manage Your Construction Projects

If you need help setting up your Microsoft 365 for success, you can request a free one-hour consultation using the form below.

Want an enterprise-level construction project management solution for Microsoft? Check out ConstructionViz.com to schedule a product demo.

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Portfolio Management in Project for the Web (Planner Premium)

Microsoft Tips |

Project for the Web (PFTW), now called Planner Premium, is Microsoft’s refresh of Project Online. Now, two features in PFTW are available to manage multiple projects at a portfolio level.

Check out this article to learn how these features work and if they can help you manage multiple project schedules.

Two features in PFTW that can help you manage your projects at a portfolio level:

Roadmap

Roadmap allows for selecting tasks (activities) from one or more plans (projects) and displaying them in a summary Gantt chart view. You can also include activities from Project Online.

The value of this view is having the ability to pick similar key tasks and compare them across plans as well as add key milestone dates, change the task status (not set, on track, at risk, high risk, and done) from a consolidated view, and launch the project from the task directly.

Portfolio

Portfolios can be created from within Planner under the My Portfolio menu.

Portfolios allow adding one or more plans to a consolidated status view. The view displays the progress percentage that is complete, which is derived directly from the plan. Start and finish dates are also displayed for the plan, and you can change the plan's overall status (on track, closed, off track, not started, and at risk).

In Summary

Both Roadmap and Portfolio provide a much-needed roll-up of project schedule data for summary reporting. Both features offer a simplistic view of the data for organizations with many projects that only need a quick status snapshot. Unfortunately, both features allow minimal customization. Power BI would still be your best bet for a more detailed portfolio view.

If you are looking to move from Project Online to PFTW, need a scheduling tool, or guidance with Microsoft Project, we’re here to help. Also, if you are looking to do more with Microsoft 365, including Power BI, you can reach out for a free one-hour consultation here.

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