Lydon Solutions

Construction Project Management Software Solutions

Construction management portal

Do you know how secure your data is?

How-To |

Read why Lydon Solutions Recommends Microsoft Azure to Construction Industry Professionals

How safe is your business critical data? This is a question that should worry any business or project owner. Server downtime means lost productivity. Meanwhile, a security breach can reveal confidential client, intellectual property and financial data. Both scenarios mean lost profits and upset customers.

We take data security very seriously at Lydon Solutions. That is why we built our award-winning Construction Program Management Portal on Microsoft Azure. And it’s also why we recommend the Azure cloud computing platform to our clients in the construction industry.

What you probably don’t know about your existing hosting provider 

Most owners and managers in the construction industry probably trust a third-party hosting company to take care of their data. These hosting providers know what they’re doing, right?

Not always.

A week does not go by without another headline about a high-profile data breach. Meanwhile, how confident are you that your hosting company is meeting its service level promises to you?

And then there are the issues of cost and flexibility. Are you getting what you paid for – or are you paying for more than you need?

Most hosting providers will sell you on a tier of service. They then buy hardware (servers, memory, and bandwidth) to resell to you. When your needs grow, they’ll upsell you to the next tier and buy more hardware.

But what happens if your requirements shrink? Chances are your costs stay the same.  It just isn’t easy to move between service tiers with most hosting providers.

Why Lydon Solutions uses Microsoft Azure 

Lydon Solutions built our data center on Microsoft Azure. This industry-leading cloud platform is the same place Microsoft hosts its own Office 365 service. Azure is also the trusted cloud platform for 57% of Fortune 500 companies.

Here’s why:

Reputation  

Microsoft Azure is the leader across Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service, Cloud Storage Services and Enterprise Application Platform as a Service.

Scale 

Microsoft Azure has datacenters in 22 regions. That is more than Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud combined!
With such a large geographic footprint, your data is protected with triple redundancy geolocated anywhere in the world.

Flexibility

Azure is extremely flexible. Need more capacity? No problem. Spin up new servers, memory, storage, and bandwidth to meet demand.

Security

Microsoft Azure is designed for security and privacy from the group up:

  • Identity and access management – Azure Active Directory helps ensure that only authorized users can access your data and applications. Available multi-factor authentication offers a highly secure sign-in option.
  • Encryption – Azure uses industry-standard protocols for end-to-end data encryption.
  • Secure networks – Azure’s infrastructure uses state of the art technology to securely interconnect virtual machines – and to connect to your on-premises datacenter. Azure Virtual Network technology extends your on-premises network to the cloud via secure virtual private network (VPN) connections.
  • Threat management – Microsoft Antimalware protects Azure services and virtual machines. Microsoft also uses intrusion detection, denial-of-service (DDoS) attack prevention, penetration testing, data analytics, and machine learning to constantly strengthen its defense and reduce risks.

Compliance

Azure meets a broad set of international and industry-specific compliance standards, such as ISO/IEC 27018, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2, as well as country-specific standards like Australia IRAP, UK G-Cloud, and Singapore MTCS.

Save Time and Money on Your Construction Projects 

Ready to deploy a complete SharePoint PMIS solution hosted on Microsoft Azure? Contact us for a Free Consultation.

You can also learn more about our Construction Program Management Portal here.

Mobile Dashboards for Construction Project Management

Company News |

We have good news for construction project managers. You can now easily provide real-time dashboards and KPIs to your team – no matter what OS or device they use.

We are big believers in the power of dashboards for construction project management. Our award-winning Construction Program Management Portal is built around robust custom dashboards. Construction projects are complex, with lots of moving parts and dependencies. Dashboards offer stakeholders a visual summary of a project’s status at a glance. And of course, more detailed information is always only a click away in our portal.

But wouldn’t it be great if your team could access these dashboards from anywhere on any device? We agree. Which is why we are very excited to offer construction project managers an even more powerful way to deploy dashboards.

Enterprise Mobile Construction Project Management Dashboards with Microsoft Data Zen

Lydon-Solutions-Construction-Project-Management-Dashboard-Example
Easily provide real-time dashboards and KPIs to your team with the Lydon Solutions Project Management Information System

Lydon Solutions now provides enterprise level dashboard and KPI reporting using Microsoft Data Zen. Now you can easily provide your team with interactive dashboards that show real-time KPIs in a visual and easy-to-understand format.

Your users can interact with these reports regardless of the device or operating system they use. That means mobile users see the same information as team members back in the office.

Best of all, no special coding is required. You can build and deploy these dashboards yourself. Data Zen makes it simple to combine information from virtually any system you use (including SharePoint).

With the Lydon Solutions Project Management Information System (PMIS) and Data Zen, you now have several powerful new capabilities, including:

  • Interactive charts – Display data in robust graphs, charts, tables, maps, and KPIs. Quickly drill down to more detailed information.
  • Real-Time Reporting – Build robust dashboards using real-time information from all your data sources. No custom coding required.
  • Support for multiple platforms and devices – Use your preferred device. Data Zen supports iOS, Android, and Windows phones, tablets, and laptops.
  • Better team Collaboration – Share KPIs and dashboards in real-time. Collaborate with team members using integrated instant messaging.
  • Dashboards on an enterprise scale – Deploy your dashboards across your entire organization and leverages SQL server and Active Directory for permissions.

Lydon Solutions continues to push the envelope of what is possible in managing your construction projects. Thought you knew SharePoint? Guess again. Contact us for a free consultation.

3 takeaways from the 2015 CMAA National Conference

Events |

Photo courtesy of CMAA. View more event photos on their Flickr page.

We are proud to have been a Bronze Sponsor at the 2015 CMAA National Conference held in Orlando last week. Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth and came out for our presentation, ‘Microsoft Excel PowerPivot and SharePoint – The Perfect Solution’.

We always enjoy the opportunity to show the powerful features of the Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal in person to industry professionals looking for a better way to manage their next project. Visitors to our booth were able to see firsthand the robust features of our Portal, including custom dashboards, collaboration features, and easy reporting tools.

CMAA National Conference SharePoint
Pictured: Rusty Ostboe, VP of Lydon Solutions & Paul Bedford, SharePoint Practice Director/Architect

Attendees at the CMAA conference came from construction companies ranging in size and resources. But all the industry professionals we met faced similar challenges.

Here are our three takeaways from the conference:

1.   Construction professionals love Excel: Our presentation on Microsoft Excel PowerPivot and SharePoint was a big hit with conference attendees. Several people came up to us afterward to say they were amazed at what is possible with Excel and SharePoint. They were unaware of the inherent functionality of these two applications and how simple it was to use them together. You can read more in our recent blog post about the power of Excel and SharePoint.

2.   Companies are looking to do more with Microsoft SharePoint: It’s no secret that we are big believers in SharePoint as an ideal Project Management Information System (PMIS). So we were thrilled to hear from companies big and small who were actively using SharePoint for every project. What they needed now was help taking SharePoint to the next level. We had several great conservations about simple enhancements to make SharePoint an even better fit for their workflow and business needs.

3.   There is a lot of frustration with custom solutions: We spoke with construction professionals from several companies frustrated with custom built PMIS solutions. These tools had been expensive to deploy, didn’t meet their needs and were poorly supported. This is a big problem for our industry. We’ve talked about why most construction PMIS implementation fail before.  And we’ve shared tips on how to deploy a PMIS for your construction business the right way.

The CMAA National Conference was a great chance to connect with friends, old and new. We especially enjoyed sharing our solution as well as learning from conference attendees. Not able to make it to this year’s event? Contact us to see how Lydon Solutions can help streamline your next project.

Join Us For The 2015 CMAA National Conference & Trade Show

Miscellaneous |

Lydon Solutions is a Bronze Sponsor at this year’s CMAA National Conference & Trade Show, taking place October 11-13th at the Hilton Bonnet Creek in Orlando. The conference is an excellent forum for industry professionals to learn about new trends, share best practices and network with their peers. We are excited to take this opportunity to showcase the benefits of our award-winning Construction Program Management Portal powered by Microsoft SharePoint as well as our full range of professional services, IT development and hosting solutions.

Look for us at booth #111 and make sure to join us for our ‘Microsoft Excel PowerPivot and SharePoint – The Perfect Solution’ presentation at the Demo Theater, Monday October 12th at 2:30pm.

This event will be special for us, since we will be unveiling our new cutting-edge enterprise mobile technology for Dashboards and KPIs that runs across IOS, Windows and Android devices.  These dashboards are served up through apps that can be downloaded across devices and then connected to your enterprise data sources such as Microsoft SharePoint.  At our booth, we’ll be demoing our power BI solutions using Microsoft Power Pivot and SharePoint – it’s sure to knock your socks off.

Not able to make it the CMAA National Conference? Contact us for more information about our services and schedule a free consultation.

Construction Project Reporting Made Simple

How-To |

A key part of every Construction Managers’ job is analyzing reports to determine project health. Timely and accurate reporting not only keeps stakeholders informed, but is critical to ensuring the success of increasingly complex mega projects and programs.

Lydon Solutions knows that it’s important for Construction Managers to quickly and easily provide the right information to management and project team members. This is why we integrate robust reporting functions into our Construction Program Management Portal using the inherent power of Microsoft SharePoint. Our Portal makes it simple to create, customize and share reports as needed. We provide visual tools such as dashboards that enable stakeholders to understand a project’s status at a glance – with more detailed information only a click away.

Example reporting tools in the Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal:

Data Driven Dashboards:

Lydon Solutions puts critical project data in dashboards integrated into team homepages so that each group has everything they need in one place to easily determine project health. Data for these dashboards can be linked to Microsoft SharePoint lists and forms, pulled from external data or be manually entered. Information can be presented as standard charts (pie, line, bar, X/Y, heat maps, bubble charts, etc.) with drill down capability.

Sharepoint ScorecardScorecards:

Raw data can be overwhelming to consume. That’s why we use visual indicators such as traffic lights, custom icons, and color coding to represent the status of an item in lists or libraries of data. We also use scorecards on form libraries to provide an approval status of a record. Rules can be easily setup to determine which conditions drive the scorecard.

Microsoft Excel SharepointMicrosoft Excel Services:

Everybody loves using Excel to manage day-to-day operations on a program.  The Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal allows you to quickly web enable your existing Excel reports/dashboards so that the entire project team can have access to them.  Users can interact with your Excel files directly on the Portal using pivot tables, slicers and data selection, reporting and file downloads.

 

SharePoint Reporting for Construction

Microsoft SharePoint Reporting Service:

SQL Reporting Services allow developers to build standard reports with charts, maps, dashboards, and log information. Data can be filtered with user parameters and exported to PDF, Word, and Excel. Users can also subscribe to reports that can be automatically scheduled.

Reporting is situation dependent and having the right information at the right time is critical.  With the Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal, all your reporting tools are at your fingertips.  Contact us to learn how we can help you simplify reporting for all your construction projects.

Thank you for a successful AACE Conference!

Events |

Lydon Solutions had an amazing time presenting our complete hosted program management solutions utilizing Microsoft SharePoint at this year’s AACE Western Winter Workshop. The event, held this year in Lake Tahoe on February 5 – 8th, was a great opportunity for our team to chat with construction professionals and demonstrate our award-winning solutions. Here are some photos from our booth at the event.

Lydon Solutions Construction Projecct Management Team at the 2015 AACE Western Winter Workshop
Members from the Lydon Solutions team (from left – Andrew Much, SharePoint Lead; Jeff Lydon, President; Rusty Ostboe, Vice President)
Jeff Lydon, president of Lydon Solutions, at the 2015 AACE Western Winter Workshop
Industry experience you can rely on: Jeff Lydon of Lydon Solutions.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth! Missed us at the conference or not able to attend this year? Download our solutions brochure to learn more about Lydon Solutions’ SharePoint portal for the construction industry and contact us for a free consultation.