Microsoft

Create Power BI Reports from Lists in Microsoft 365

How-To | September 8, 2021

Quickly create business intelligence reports in Power BI using your Microsoft SharePoint list schema and data with Microsoft's new guided authoring experience.

Regular readers will know that we are big proponents of SharePoint and the utility of Microsoft Power BI, so we were pleasantly surprised by the new functionality allowing the creation of a Power BI report from a SharePoint list. Microsoft's new guided authoring experience will let you create a formatted Power BI report from your list schema and data in just a couple of clicks. This new Power BI functionality is available for the Microsoft 365 standalone lists app and SharePoint Lists.

Since our project management information system, Construction Viz, utilizes SharePoint lists, this is an excellent addition to our feature set (see screenshots below).

To take further advantage of Power BI's advanced data visualization capabilities, go into Edit mode. Once a report is saved and published, it will appear in the same submenu under Integrate > Power BI.

Note: Users with a Microsoft 365 E5 license or Power BI Pro license will have the complete report authoring and viewing experience.

Easily create a Power BI report in Construction Viz SharePoint Daily Report List app

Power BI Report generated from Construction Viz SharePoint Daily Report List

Lydon Solutions provides turnkey Microsoft 365 solutions for the construction industry. If you need help building or editing Microsoft Power BI reports, check out our managed services. If you need an enterprise project management information system for Microsoft 365, complete with reporting, check out Construction Viz.

How to Start Managing Construction Projects in Microsoft 365 – Part 3

How-To | April 12, 2021

This is part three of three in a series of blogs called How to Manage Your Construction Projects in Microsoft 365.

Welcome to the third part of our blog on how to get started with managing construction projects in Microsoft 365. You can read the first and second parts here. If you have been following along, you should have your new Microsoft 365 tenant set up and the infrastructure in place. Now it is time to configure some Microsoft 365 services for your construction projects.

While there are no construction-specific services in Microsoft 365, you can customize several to meet your needs. But be aware that technology changes pretty fast with Microsoft; they regularly enhance, add, and sometimes remove their Microsoft 365 services. It is always good to keep an eye on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap and their yearly tech conferences like Ignite.

As we mentioned previously, there is no right or wrong answer here. The important thing is to fully understand your users' requirements and assess the options against these to determine what works for your organization.

So, let's get started with some of the Microsoft 365 services you can configure for a construction project.

Microsoft 365 Services for Construction

Document Storage

Your construction documents include SOWs, drawings, and specs, which can be in multiple formats such as PDF, Word, and Excel. You can upload these documents to several Microsoft 365 services, including OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint. Here are few things to keep in mind when selecting your document repository:

While OneDrive and Teams allow document saving, they lack metadata functionality, so you will need to use a file folder structure for organizing files.
Consider also that OneDrive is primarily for personal storage.
With SharePoint, you can add metadata and folders, which improves your search and reporting capabilities.

Forms

Forms such as submittals, transmittals, permits, RFIs, invoices, inspection reports, and the like are the primary input for any project management system. Microsoft 365 comes with various services that you can use for forms, including Power Apps, Forms, Lists (SharePoint), To-Do, Planner tasks, and Microsoft Project activities. You could configure any of these tools with form-style capabilities. But if you are looking to build out an enterprise-level solution, you will most likely want to leverage Power Apps. Power Apps allow you to build forms and complete applications from scratch and store information into multiple database back-ends such as SharePoint lists and libraries and the Dataverse.

Check out my previous blog post with tips on building construction forms using Power Apps and request our free example RFI Power App to get you started creating your own.

Notifications

Alerting and notifying your users of events or action items is a core requirement for any project management system. With Microsoft 365, several apps (Planner, To-Do, etc.) include built-in notification features. You can also configure SharePoint lists and libraries to send alerts, and Power Automate workflows can also do the same. And finally, there is the old-faithful email notification. New technologies, like Adaptive Cards, can be used to meet your users where they work and allow them to interact with your project management system without even leaving an email inbox. You can learn more about Adaptive Cards over on our Construction Viz blog.

Unless your organization is already using some of these services, we recommend building Power Automate workflows that send email notifications to your project team as a good starting point.

Scheduling

Depending on the complexity of your project's schedule, several services are available in Microsoft 365 that may work as a scheduling tool for you:

Microsoft Project. Microsoft Project provides integrated Gantt chart scheduling, cost tracking, and resource management. Project is the go-to solution for most construction companies and has become tightly integrated with SharePoint over the years. Gantt chart scheduling in Project employs critical path analysis that can be manually or auto-updated depending on your need to analyze network logic. Project does require a separate license in Microsoft 365.
Microsoft Planner. Microsoft Planner approaches work from a task management perspective. Tasks are assigned to team members and then updated using List, Board, Charts, and Schedule views. There is no Gantt chart or network logic, but you can manage work on a task-by-task basis with the board view. Planner also integrates nicely into Teams and SharePoint.
Microsoft Lists. The new Microsoft Lists app is a modern SharePoint list that has become a stand-alone service in Microsoft 365. Lists are a great way to track tasks, events, assets, and more. Like Planner, there are multiple views available for creating and tracking progress, and your lists are available in both Teams and SharePoint.
Microsoft Power Platform. With the Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI), users can build out robust scheduling solutions that integrate with Teams and SharePoint. You should note that while the Power Platform offers no-code and low-code experiences for building solutions, they are generally more suited to advanced users in your organization. There may also be times, depending on your requirements, where you will need help from IT resources. Be aware that using Power Platform to its fullest may require additional licensing beyond your basic Microsoft 365 license level. See my blog post discussing some best practices with the Power Platform you should implement for your organization if you go this route.
Third-party applications. If the standard Microsoft 365 services do not seem to fit the bill, third-party scheduling applications can plug into Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, such as our Construction Viz Scheduler.

Cost Management

Construction cost management is often unique to each company. You can customize any of several services in Microsoft 365 to meet your needs:

Microsoft Project. If you manage costs using resources, then Project might be a good solution. You can assign units and costs to resources and then associate them with scheduled activities. It's simple and easy to then run cash flows based on your schedule. Project also integrates into SharePoint and Teams. But as mentioned above, Project requires a separate license in Microsoft 365.
Microsoft Lists. If you are looking to build an interactive web-based cost report solution, Lists is pretty flexible. You can create your cost columns in a list and then use views to group, filter, sort, and total each column. You can then utilize Power Automate to update list columns from multiple data sources and use Power BI for reporting. Lists are available in both Teams and SharePoint.
Microsoft Power Platform. With the Power Platform, you can build a complete cost management solution and integrate it with Teams and SharePoint. Depending on the complexity of your cost tracking and the need for stringent corporate controls, the Power Platform might be your best approach.
Microsoft Dynamics. Microsoft Dynamics is a suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) software applications for managing many aspects of a company. Dynamics can be an expensive solution for cost tracking, but it is incredibly flexible and customizable to your needs. Dynamics is an additional license to the standard Microsoft 365 plans.
Third-party applications. If the Microsoft 365 services don't fit the bill, third-party cost tracking applications can plug into Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, such as our Construction Viz Cost Report.

As you can see, there are many options for you to consider. We have only touched on some of the possibilities in this post. Hopefully, it will give you a place to start your journey towards construction project management in Microsoft 365.

A final piece of advice: If you find all this somewhat overwhelming, do not worry. There are many SharePoint consultants available to help you. But be sure to choose one that not only understands Microsoft 365 and all its associated technologies but, more importantly, has a deep understanding of construction and can demonstrate a track record of delivering successful IT solutions across the industry.

Get Expert Help with Microsoft 365

If your construction organization needs help setting up your Microsoft 365 environment, you can request a free one-hour consultation by clicking here. If you are looking for a turnkey construction project management solution or a specific construction app for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint, check out ConstructionViz.com.

Check out more blogs from How to Manage Your Construction Projects in Microsoft 365

How to Start Managing Construction Projects in Microsoft 365 – Part 1

How-To | March 2, 2021

This is part one of three in a series of blogs called How to Manage Your Construction Projects in Microsoft 365.

More and more construction organizations are moving to Microsoft 365 to manage their businesses and provide their employees with the tools they need to get work done. Logically, one of the first questions in a construction company is: "Can we run our construction projects from Microsoft 365?"

The good news is that Microsoft 365 has many features that are ideal for managing projects. The not-so-good news is that identifying the right mix of Microsoft 365 tools for your organization to use for projects can be overwhelming with so many service options available.

So, where do you begin? In this first installment of our latest blog post series, we will help you navigate your way into managing construction projects in Microsoft 365. In future posts, we will dive deeper into your options.

Five tips to get started managing construction projects in Microsoft 365

Do these things first to manage your construction projects with Microsoft 365 successfully:

Start small and build on wins

We recommend starting small in your approach and focusing more on upfront planning. It's best to pick a pilot project and phase the work as much as possible.

Plan, plan, plan

We always recommend spending as much time as you can in the "planning" phase before moving forward with any real development. If you have not already, check out our four-part blog series on implementing a Project Management Information System (Planning, Evaluating Technology, Implementing, and Supporting) to get the big picture.

To get started, consider the following:

- Define the problem. Make sure to clarify what problems you are trying to solve. By documenting and agreeing to a problem statement, you will keep the team focused on solving that problem. You will also be able to develop a cost-benefit analysis for implementing a solution.
- Establish the budget and schedule. Before embarking on your journey, make sure to set aside a budget and a deadline as to when you would like to have this solution in place.
- Assemble your team. Identify and build a team of subject matter experts who will use the solution. It would be best if you involved this team to some level throughout the entire process, from requirements gathering to implementation.
- Define your requirements. This step is the most critical in any software implementation. Take the time to document your as-is business processes (what you are doing now) and your to-be processes (what would you want to do). There are multiple ways of collecting requirements: interviews, surveys, use cases, etc. Check out our blog posts on requirement gathering in general, as well as how to use case studies.
- Develop document controls processes. Invest in developing your document controls processes to ensure that you standardize the data you collect and how you use it for reporting and search.

The best way to signup for Microsoft 365

If your organization is already using Microsoft 365, you are all set. If not, be wary of reaching out to third-party Microsoft 365 licensing providers to set up your environment. We have seen some providers lock down their clients' tenants and restrict access to many services available in Microsoft 365. Our recommendation is to contact Microsoft directly to set up your own Microsoft 365 company tenant. If you need help, check out our Microsoft 365 managed services.

Research your options

Depending on your license, there are many tools and services available in Microsoft 365 (e.g., Teams, Planner, To-Do, etc.), some of which provide overlapping features and functionalities. If your organization prefers to work in one service over another, that service should be central to your design. For example, if your team likes to work in email, then explore forms, reports, workflows, and so on that can be made available within Outlook.

Understand your licensing

Microsoft licensing is always changing and can be very confusing and potentially expensive. Ensure you have the right licenses to deliver all aspects of the proposed solution, from reporting to workflows. Make sure to monitor licensing continually to ensure you are paying for what you need.

One thing to note is that Microsoft 365 provides for guest licenses, which lets you provide limited access and share information with users outside your organization. Guest licenses can be handy when working with subcontractors that you wish to allow access to your projects. Allocating guest licenses does not incur a charge, but there are limitations to this feature. Also, make sure to document any access given using guest licenses to make sure internal or confidential information is not unwittingly shared.

Are you interested in managing your construction projects with Microsoft 365?

We will dig deeper into the Microsoft 365 services available to manage your construction project in our next blog post. Stay tuned!

If your construction organization needs help setting up your Microsoft 365 environment, you can request a free one-hour consultation. If you are looking for a turnkey construction project management solution or a specific construction app for Microsoft 365, check out ConstructionViz.com.

Check out more blogs from How to Manage Your Construction Projects in Microsoft 365

Keeping you on track with Microsoft To Do

Microsoft News | October 28, 2020

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 | September 29, 2020

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 | August 24, 2020

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.

Create Power BI Reports from Lists in Microsoft 365

How to Start Managing Construction Projects in Microsoft 365 – Part 3