Lydon Solutions

Construction Project Management Software Solutions

construction project management

Struggling to Share SharePoint Files Externally? Here’s the Fix

Microsoft Tips |

Construction projects involve sharing files between owners and contractors. Many organizations have adopted Microsoft SharePoint as a collaboration platform to house project records and share them with external team members. Unfortunately, we've heard from several clients that they are unable to share files with team members outside their organization, or the process is too cumbersome. Check out this post to find out how to make this work for your construction projects.

Microsoft SharePoint Sharing Overview

Out of the box, users can share files with anyone who has permissions to the SharePoint site and its contents. To share with someone who does not have access to the site and who is outside of your organization, you can choose to add a person as a guest user or share a file or folder with anyone using a link, depending on your tenant and site sharing settings.

SharePoint Admin Center Tenant Settings

To set up sharing for the entire tenant (all sites), a SharePoint administrator needs to access the Microsoft 365 SharePoint admin center. Within the admin center, under the Policies menu is Sharing, where you can set the policies regarding sharing across the entire tenant (all sites/projects). In the settings, there is a slider where you can adjust how permissive the sharing is for both SharePoint and OneDrive.

Below are the levels of sharing permissiveness and the impact to SharePoint sites/projects:

  • Anyone. This level allows users to share links to files and folders with anyone and does not require the external person to authenticate. While this seems like an ideal setup, it could also lead to people sharing files that shouldn't be shared with external team members. Note: More than likely, you will need to share files on a SharePoint site/project with team members who don't have an organizational account and are not guest users. If that is the case, you will need this to keep this level since these settings are inherited from the tenant down to the site level.
  • New and existing guests. Guest users (external users that have been added to the tenant) will need to sign in, or they can use a verification code. This option is most likely the control level that is realistic for most organizations.
  • Existing guests. Only guests previously added to your tenant will have the ability to open files and folders. This option is probably not realistic because projects involve multiple stakeholders whom you need to share files with, but your organization has not yet added them as guest users.
  • Only people in your organization. No external sharing. If your project has external team members, this option will not work since it prevents sharing files or folders externally.

There is a slew of other, more granular settings available, but for the purpose of just sharing, the options above are a good starting point to understand the impact across the entire tenant.

What if I need to share with anyone on my SharePoint site/project?

Now you might ask, what if my tenant doesn't allow Anyone sharing at the tenant level? Unfortunately, you will not be able to share with Anyone at the site level.

So, you have a couple of options:

  1. Make all external users Guest Users or Licensed users in your tenant.
  2. As an organization, allow Anyone sharing at the tenant level, but at the site level, set the default to restrict sharing to new and existing groups. Then, on a site or project-specific case, allow a SharePoint Site Administrator to change sharing to Anyone. See below for site-specific sharing settings. Note: Allowing this level should be monitored, and if need be, you should put in place SharePoint compliance policies.
SharePoint Admin Center Site Settings

Get Expert Help Setting Up SharePoint for Construction Project Management

SharePoint permissions and sharing settings can be complex, especially at the site and project level. If you're still wrapping your head around how Microsoft 365 handles permissions, be sure to check out our previous blog article on Microsoft SharePoint permissions for a broader overview.

Need help setting up permission groups, site sharing policies, or aligning your configuration with your organization's needs?

As part of our Microsoft 365 Managed Services, we help construction teams implement secure, scalable, and easy-to-manage SharePoint environments.

Request a free one-hour consultation to get expert guidance tailored to your business.

Get a Free Consultation

Construction Document Management and the SharePoint Term Store

Microsoft Tips |

Most construction organizations prefer to store electronic project files in folders. While a file folder system is familiar and easy to use, metadata can offer many benefits. This article delves into the SharePoint term store, one approach to leveraging metadata as part of your overall document control strategy.

Folders vs. metadata is always a source of discussion when implementing a construction document management solution. In a previous post, we discussed the pros and cons of metadata vs. folders. If you want to gain more reporting and searching on your files, the SharePoint term store might be an option without overturning the folder applecart.

What is the SharePoint Term Store?

Metadata is information about information. The SharePoint term store is a directory for creating and managing metadata in SharePoint.

So, instead of building custom SharePoint columns or enabling site columns to store metadata in each document library, the term store allows you to add a managed metadata column that points to the centrally managed term store.

Build the SharePoint term store once and add it in multiple places.

How Do I Use the SharePoint Term Store?

Once you create a term in the term store, you can add it as a managed metadata column to SharePoint lists and libraries, Teams files, and even Power Apps.

After you add the managed metadata column, a user can “tag” files with terms instead of just adding them to a folder when uploading.

Where Do I Create and Administer Terms?

As a SharePoint administrator, you can navigate to the term store from the SharePoint admin center under Content Services. The term store is organized in a hierarchical structure.

A good example of a hierarchical set of terms would be the CSI MasterFormat. The Term Store is organized as follows:

  • Term Groups - Term groups are related terms identified with a folder icon. Ex. CSI MasterFormat
  • Term Sets - Term sets are added to Term Groups to collect related terms. Term sets display with a multiple tag icon. Ex. Divisions
  • Terms - Terms are the values within the Term Sets that the user would select when “tagging” a file. Terms display with a tag icon as well. You can add nested terms, like folders, to create a hierarchy. Ex. 010000 General Requirements, 013000 Administrative Requirements,, 0131000 Project Management and Coordination

Terms are the values within the term sets to select when “tagging” a file. Terms display with tags as well. You can add nested terms, just like folders, to create a hierarchy.

The Advantages of Adding Terms to Your Projects

Using terms with your project is beneficial for several reasons:

  • You can filter and search by terms to make finding files easier than just knowing the folder structure or file name.
  • You can assign multiple terms to each file without creating additional columns.
  • You can import terms from Excel.
  • You can still use folders with terms.
  • Managed metadata columns are available for reporting in Power BI.

Considerations:

  • Users must take the extra step of “tagging” the files unless you add a custom workflow.
  • Up-front planning is essential so that once they are out in the wild, terms are used correctly and consistently across projects.
  • A term store administrator/point of contact should be assigned to manage terms and overall change management.

There are many features in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 that can help construction organizations manage their projects. If you need help delivering the right solution for your specific needs, you can reach out for a free one-hour consultation by filling out the form below. If you are looking for an enterprise construction management solution for Microsoft 365, you can request a demo of Construction Viz here.

Get a Free Consultation

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.

Get a Free Consultation

Copilot and Planner Premium – R.I.P. Project Schedulers?

AI Solutions |

Still on the fence about whether to jump in and pay for Planner Premium (formerly Project for the Web)? Microsoft has recently integrated Copilot AI into Planner Premium. Find out how Copilot can take scheduling in Planner Premium to the next level.

There are two Microsoft project web applications: Project Online, which has been around since 2016, and Planner Premium (Project for the Web). While Planner Premium might lack some features of Project Online, it is the future of Microsoft Project. With the addition of Copilot and the upcoming Project Manager Agent, Planner Premium is turning into a powerful tool.

So, you might wonder what AI could do for scheduling. I also asked that way back in 2016 when bots were picking up steam. While there are aspects of a scheduler role that cannot be done simply by AI, I can say that we are knocking on the door of having a scheduling AI agent capable of building, analyzing, and reporting on project schedules.

Read on to see how our testing of Copilot to assist with construction project management turned out.

Using Copilot for Construction Project Management

Copilot works by using prompts. The better the prompts, the better the results (assuming the AI is up to snuff). For the purposes of our analysis, we used the out-of-the-box Copilot, which had no agents.

The following are some of the prompts that returned some fascinating results.

Prompt: Build a plan for an excavation construction project.

Result: Copilot returned a list of grouped tasks based on a typical excavation project. Was it perfect? No. While it created the tasks and the associated goals, it did not add dates, durations, or logic.

Prompt: Create a task.

Result:  Copilot creates a task, but again, it has no dates or durations.

Prompt: Delete all or a task.

Result: Copilot will delete one or more tasks, but the goals remain.

Prompt: What is the critical path?

Result: While you can filter a schedule by critical path, the prompt will display the critical path tasks.

Prompt: What if a task is delayed by X days?

Result: This is pretty slick. It did a schedule scenario and provided the impact of the delay on each activity and the end date of the project.

Prompt: Give the status report for the project.

Result: Copilot will provide a formal response that includes the project manager, start date, finish date, duration, overall percent complete, effort, status of each task, and goals. This result could be huge as schedule analysis can take days to weeks in some cases, and Copilot did this in seconds. From there, you could copy and paste it into an email or a Copilot page and send it off to the project team for your weekly schedule review.

Prompt: How can we expedite the procurement process?

Result: This was a prompt provided by Copilot that we clicked. Copilot returned a mitigation approach that includes a general list of topics with explanations to consider in order to get the procurement process back on schedule.

Prompt: What activities are delayed against the baseline?

Result: We first created a baseline and then progressed the schedule. When we entered this prompt, Copilot summarized which activities have been delayed as well as the impact on the overall schedule compared to the baseline.

Evaluating Copilot for Construction Project Management

Our testing reveals some shortcomings and caveats in using Copilot to help provide scheduling support on construction projects. However, it also shows how fast this technology is improving.

Obvious Gaps

  • Copilot does not include start date, end date, duration, or schedule logic when adding tasks.
  • You cannot prompt Copilot to update the percent complete, schedule logic, or status of an existing task.
  • You occasionally have to close out of Copilot and reopen to get a prompt to run.

Additional Considerations

Planner Premium saves data to the Dataverse just like Dynamics and Power Apps. This integration opens many options for building custom Copilot agents to perform specific tasks for your project.

Lydon Solutions has been building custom solutions using Power Apps and Power Pages to augment Planner Premium, such as a Schedule of Value application for contractors to upload an Excel SOV for approval.

If you would like to know more about Planner Premium or our catalog of solutions, you can request a free one-hour consultation here.

Get a Free Consultation

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.

Get a Free Consultation

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.