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How to Start Managing Construction Projects in Microsoft 365 – Part 2

How-To | April 6, 2021

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

In a previous post, I shared some tips on getting your organization set up to manage your construction projects using Microsoft 365. Now that you have your new Microsoft 365 tenant in place and have licensing covered, I'll cover which tools in the suite you can use for construction project management.

Microsoft 365 has an abundance of features and services that you can use to help manage your construction projects. There is not a right and 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.

Microsoft 365 Tools to Manage Construction Projects

Database

The database is the most crucial feature of any IT solution. With Microsoft 365, you have several options, including the following:

SharePoint Online – Microsoft SharePoint's lists and libraries make it exceptionally flexible, allowing you to take it in almost limitless directions. It is a strong candidate for your database solution.

Teams – Microsoft Teams has been in the spotlight lately as Microsoft adds features to this collaboration tool. The Teams app, built on top of SharePoint Online sites, provides a quick-start alternative that will get you up and running faster. It also offers integration with lots of ready-made apps. There are some limitations, however.

OneDrive – OneDrive is Microsoft's personal file/document storage and sharing solution. While it can be a powerful database option, its user-centric design focuses on ad hoc file sharing, limiting its information sharing and collaboration capabilities.

Dataverse –Microsoft's Dataverse is a scalable low-code data platform that Power Apps can leverage. I'll talk more about it in a future blog post.

“Database” example - SharePoint site contents

Sites

Users need a way to access the system to view reports, search data, and act. While users can navigate to all the Microsoft 365 services using their Microsoft 365 portal, it can be a bit overwhelming. Building SharePoint sites or Teams sites allows you to aggregate data and simplify navigation. It also facilitates security and permissions to restrict sensitive information to specific users. However, consider how users will find information carefully, as planning the navigation and information architecture is critical to ensuring usability.

Example SharePoint site

Workflow

Power Automate is the workflow engine in Microsoft 365. Power Automate can connect data across all Microsoft 365 services and external sources (requires an on-premises data gateway). Most Microsoft 365 plans include some licensing level for Power Automate; however, more advanced features generally require additional licensing. Also, there are many third-party add-ons that you can leverage that typically have different licensing requirements.

Power Automate workflow

Permissions

Microsoft 365 and SharePoint have incredibly powerful permissions and access management controls for managing both licensed users and unlicensed guest users. Here is a quick rundown.

Microsoft 365 Groups

You can use groups to control access across all Microsoft 365 services. There are two roles, Owner and Member. Owners can change the group's settings and the membership while members can remove themselves, add members to a public group, and recommend guest users to receive invitations.
You can assign access to your team as owners or members to any Microsoft 365 service.
The Microsoft 365 admin center is where you manage groups and add members. Unfortunately, not everyone will have access to the Microsoft 365 tenant admin center, and this is where SharePoint's permission groups come into play for more granular permissions controls.

Admin center - 365 Group administration

SharePoint Permission Groups

SharePoint permission groups assign permissions to SharePoint-specific content (e.g., sites, lists, libraries, etc.).
SharePoint groups provide permissions levels such as read, write, and everything in between. You can assign a group to any SharePoint content with unique permission levels.
If you selectively grant access to content within your SharePoint sites, make sure to map out a permissions strategy and develop auditable permissions templates, especially with guest users.

SharePoint permissions levels

Reporting

The primary reporting service in Microsoft 365 is Power BI. It is a powerful dashboarding and analytics tool. If you need paginated reports (for example, a log report of many records or a printable version of a form), you will likely need to consider additional Power BI licensing, SQL Server reporting, or other third-party tools. See my prior post on "Microsoft Power BI and Paginated Reports for Construction."

Power BI status report

With this blog, we have covered the critical infrastructure services required for building a construction management solution in Microsoft 365. While the path can differ for every organization depending on your budget, resources, and processes, we hope this series will provide insight into how you can use Microsoft 365 to manage your construction projects. Our upcoming third part in this series will cover construction-specific functionality like scheduling and cost management.

Get Export Help with Microsoft 365 Managed Services

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/SharePoint, check out ConstructionViz.com.

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

How to Use Microsoft Teams for Construction Timekeeping and Shift Management

How-To | February 17, 2021

The Microsoft Shifts add-in for Microsoft Teams is a no-frills time management tool. If you need a simple way to manage your small construction team's actual time worked, Shifts offers you a straightforward solution. Here are some things to consider when evaluating this tool for your team.

Microsoft released the Shifts add-in for Microsoft Teams as a simple schedule management tool for first-line workers in 2019. Shifts enables workers to track their hours and tasks right in Teams and even supports features like requesting time off and balancing workloads with the "move to open shifts" option. The add-in has a clean and intuitive interface, with daily, weekly, and monthly views. You can add users, groups, and shifts in just one or two clicks. The tool works with Excel, letting you import and export schedule data.

The Shifts add-in integrates tightly with Teams. You can pin the Shifts icon to the Teams navigation, making it easy to access and update. Each Team can have a Shifts schedule associated with it. If you have downloaded Teams for your mobile device, you can also access Shifts from inside the app.

Is Microsoft Shifts a good fit for construction teams?

So how could you use Microsoft Shifts for construction? If you need a simple way to manage a small team's actual time worked, the add-in is a straightforward solution, providing a no-frills time management tool. It finds a sweet spot in making sure you have coverage on your project when needed while letting you visually see gaps where you might need to move resources around.

However, there are a few limitations to keep in mind:

Unlike Microsoft Teams, which stores data in a SharePoint site collection, Shifts data resides in Microsoft Azure. Therefore, you cannot directly access your Shifts data.
Hourly rates for cost projections and planning are not part of the current functionality.
There is currently no integration with Microsoft Planner or Project.
You cannot consolidate schedules created in Shifts from multiple teams.

If you are looking for a simple timesheet tracker for smaller construction projects or a simple time tracking solution for facilities maintenance, give Shifts a try. Just understand the tool's limitations.

On the other hand, if you need support for billing, cost tracking, Gantt scheduling, or the ability to customize forms and UI, I suggest considering other Microsoft 365 services and applications which would better fit your needs.

Want to do more with Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 is an incredibly powerful suite of enterprise tools. If you need help setting up your Microsoft 365 tenant for your construction organization, check out our Managed Services and submit a free consultation request.

Need a turnkey enterprise construction management solution? Check out Construction Viz and the available apps for Microsoft 365 at ConstructionViz.com.

Beware of Phishing Attacks This Holiday Season

How-To | December 7, 2020

We are all somewhat distracted and more prone to rush to get tasks completed around the holidays as we focus on family and friends and the season. This year with the increase in working remotely and the rapid adoption of Office Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams, attackers are increasingly leveraging these platforms for phishing attacks.

We wanted to highlight a new type of threat occurring more, especially this year, in the hope we can alert you to the risks associated with using cloud services.

A New Phishing Threat to Cloud Services

With this new phishing threat, an attacker compromises a user's account, gains access to their contacts and sends malicious links from legitimate domains. The email may contain an invoice, voicemail, or similar legitimate communication that mimics regular business practices and misleads you into thinking the message has come from a colleague or partner.

After an attacker compromises a SharePoint or OneDrive account, they upload a malicious file and change the account's sharing permissions to "public" so that anyone can access it. This malicious link is then shared with the compromised users' contacts or other targeted individuals. Sometimes the link is a unique redirect URL and so it can be difficult to detect, as it would not appear on any URL reputation repository.

Some attackers have strategically placed malicious content in one compromised account while using a second account – perhaps one belonging to an important or credible individual that one might expect communication from – to send the link. Even if the second tenant's compromised account is discovered, the malicious file hosted in the first tenant would not be taken down. And so, the attack would persist.

Other similarly abused cloud-based services include Sway, Dropbox, Google APIs, Google Docs, Google Drive, and Box.

Be Careful of Phishing Attacks this Holiday Season

These types of scams are difficult to detect and even harder to block or mitigate. Please make sure to remain vigilant and question before trusting any communications, especially during this holiday season. If you have questions about phishing attacks or online security threats, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team.

Microsoft 365 is an ideal collaboration tool for challenging times

How-To | July 8, 2020

Efforts across the nation to combat the spread of Coronavirus have transformed the workplace overnight by emptying offices, halting business travel, and promoting remote work. We can all hope that the need for these measures will be short-lived, but it is safe to say that the future of how we work and interact will potentially be forever changed.

Some businesses were already ahead of the curve embracing digital collaboration and remote productivity tools. But many organizations, particularly in construction, are playing catch up. Fortunately, most companies already have access to best-in-class collaboration and remote work tools with Microsoft 365.

Read on to learn how the Microsoft 365 suite can empower your employees to be productive no matter where they are. And if your organization needs expert guidance getting up to speed on remote collaboration, Lydon Solutions is here help. Contact us for a free consultation today.

Using Microsoft 365 for Remote Collaboration

Microsoft 365 offers many features to improve collaboration across the enterprise that extend well beyond Outlook, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. The service includes a host of new applications that let teams easily share information, manage projects, and effectively collaborate while working remotely.

Collaboration Tools in Microsoft 365

SharePoint Online is a web-based enterprise content management (ECM) tool that integrates with Microsoft Office. You can use SharePoint as a document repository and information portal to share and manage content, make information quickly searchable, empower teamwork, and enable seamless collaboration across the organization. SharePoint is also the backend to many of the popular applications in Office 365, such as Teams, Planner, Project, and Yammer. Microsoft has a getting-started resource for SharePoint here.

Microsoft Teams is a unified communication and collaboration platform combining persistent workplace chat, video meetings, voice-over-IP (VoIP), file storage, real-time document collaboration, and integration with a growing list of apps from Microsoft and third-parties. This impressive lineup of features is why the application is fast becoming an easy-to-use project management aid that can help you organize small teams, manage progress, and store project information. You can even combine Teams with Microsoft Whiteboard for real-time visual brainstorming and problem-solving. You can learn more about Microsoft Teams here.

Microsoft Planner is a project management application that allows organizations to create, assign, and organize work visually with support for private or shared plans for collaboration. This easy-to-use tool is an excellent option for those that prefer to manage simple projects using Kanban, calendars, and task lists. You can learn more about Microsoft Planner here.

Microsoft Project Online is a cloud-based tool to help project managers develop a schedule, assign resources to tasks, track progress, manage the budget, and analyze workloads. Microsoft Project is a staple in the construction industry for managing project schedules, and both the cloud-based and on-premise versions integrate deeply with the rest of the Office 365 suite, including other collaboration tools like SharePoint and Teams.

Reporting in Microsoft 365

Power BI is a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your data, making it easy to share insights across your organization or embed reports in your app, SharePoint sites, and websites. With Power BI, you can connect to hundreds of data sources and bring your data to life with live dashboards and reports. Power BI is a great reporting solution for creating interactive dashboards that can embed in SharePoint pages or external websites with the ability to permission control reports.

Workflow Automation Across Microsoft 365

Power Automate is an Office 365 service that makes it practical and simple for line-of-business users to build workflows that automate time-consuming business tasks and processes across applications and services. Power Automate is Microsoft’s workflow engine, and it continues to gain more and more connectors and functionality. Users can work smarter by creating workflows to automate manual processes such as approvals, alerts, and data integration, even sharing them with the rest of the organization.

Build Custom Applications in Microsoft 365

Power Apps is a suite of services, connectors, and a data platform that provides a rapid application development environment to build custom apps for your business needs. With Power Apps, you could create custom forms and make them available as a standalone application or post it to SharePoint Online.

Get Expert Help with Microsoft 365

Are you feeling a little intimidated by all the features and options found in Microsoft 365? Lydon Solutions can offer expert assistance if you need help setting up your Microsoft 365 tenant to manage projects. We also offer a complete turnkey solution for construction teams called Construction Viz that is powered by SharePoint and Microsoft 365.

Please be safe and look out for one another during these challenging times.

How to Start Managing Construction Projects in Microsoft 365 – Part 2