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Keeping you on track with Microsoft To Do

Microsoft News |

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.

Which Microsoft 365 Collaboration App Should I Use?

Microsoft News |

Microsoft 365 provides a unified environment for collaboration and teamwork. All services are managed under the same framework and identity management solution.

While there are many different Microsoft 365 applications available to users, some providing similar collaboration capabilities, it can be confusing as to which ones are best for your project. To help eliminate some of the confusion, Microsoft published an article explaining how information is organized by Loops, including the recommended applications. Below is the Microsoft Loops diagram:

Identifying Tools for Collaboration – Microsoft Loops and Office 365 Groups


Inner loop. Targeted for interactions and collaboration between close knit teams. This loop is the day-to-day communication between team members working on a project.

• Teams. Teams provides communication (chat, VOIP, webinars, meetings), file sharing (where users can share and edit Microsoft Office applications in real time), and a centralized portal for collaboration across Microsoft 365 applications. It is fast becoming the go-to project management application in Microsoft 365 that brings all other applications together into a unified platform.

Outer loop. Targeted for conversations and discovery within the broader audience. This loop is for communicating within the entire organization. This includes company or organizational communities, meetings, training, and lessons learned.

• Yammer. Yammer is like a Facebook for your business. It provides a way to reach out and connect to your organization by posting questions, announcements, articles, news, blogs, videos, polls, and even praise for your employees or co-workers. While Teams has its own chat functionality, Yammer takes it to another level with the ability to create communities and search posts- which are currently not available in Teams. While there are many companies using Yammer, most of its functionality continues to be added to Teams. This could potentially lead to it being completely absorbed by Teams in the future.

Email. Personal method for communicating with another party electronically. It has been, and will continue to be, the preferred method of communication on projects.

• Outlook. Outlook is one of the largest email clients in existence and is designed for personal information management including webmail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks. Outlook is the De facto standard for how a business communicates in Microsoft 365- especially between internal and external team members.

Files, Sites, and Content. Every collaborative application in Microsoft 365 consists of Files (Microsoft Office application files such as Word and Excel) Sites (for organizing files and sharing your data) and Content (any other file types such as images, video, and other non-Microsoft Office 365 applications).

• SharePoint. SharePoint is the #1 Enterprise Content Management System in the world. All of your project content can be created, edited, stored, and shared in SharePoint. SharePoint is at the core of all Microsoft 365 applications – Teams, Yammer, Project, and Planner. Every time you create a team or a project, a site collection is automatically created in SharePoint. Think of SharePoint as the backend database where all applications integrate with each other. So if you prefer SharePoint over Teams or Yammer, it can be used as both the Inner and Outer loop and vice versa.

Office 365 Groups. Since there can be many site collections created from all of the Microsoft 365 applications, there needed to be a way to bring all of them together for access management. Office 365 Groups associate users across applications and automatically create outlook mailboxes. Combining Office 365 Groups with SharePoint Hub sites completes the access and navigation across these disparate site collections.  Here's a link to a previous post explaining Office 365 Groups.

Planner and Project. What about Planner and Project? Both applications seem to be a part of the Inner Loop, and while they are very much collaborative, they seem to be more task and activity management centric than the central hub for collaboration on your projects like Teams or SharePoint.

Discover Project Management and Organization in Microsoft 365

We hope this article helps provide some guidance when it comes to Microsoft 365 applications that you may use but have not had the chance to fully explore. If you have any questions or are looking to setup your construction project organizations in Microsoft 365, check out our Microsoft 365 Managed Services and submit a free consultation request.

Looking for more of a turnkey, enterprise-ready Project Management Information System (PMIS) for Microsoft 365? Check out Construction Viz and submit a request for a free demo.

Connect A SharePoint Calendar with Outlook

Tips from the Field |

Here’s how you can create a project calendar in SharePoint, connect it with Outlook and share it with your team to keep everyone in sync.

The SharePoint Calendar App can be added to any SharePoint site. It behaves much the same as an Outlook Calendar and can be customized as needed.

A handy feature of a SharePoint calendar is the ability to connect it to Outlook. This functionality allows a user to add the SharePoint Calendar to their personal Outlook Calendar view. Events can then be updated bi-directionally from Outlook to SharePoint and vice versa. This is a great way to easily get your entire project team working off the same schedule.

Follow the steps below to get your SharePoint Calendar connected to Outlook.

Step One – Connect Your SharePoint Calendar App to Outlook

1.       Navigate to a SharePoint Calendar.

2.       Click the Calendar tab in the Ribbon.

3.       Click the Connect to Outlook button in the Ribbon.

4.       A browser dialogue box will appear. Allow the website to open a program on your computer.

5.      Select “Yes” when prompted to Connect this SharePoint Calendar to Outlook

6.     If your SharePoint is externally hosted, you may be asked to log in.

Step Two – Open Your SharePoint Calendar in Outlook

7.     Go to Outlook and navigate to your calendar view.

8.    Under My Calendars in Outlook you will see the new SharePoint Calendar.  Check the box next to it to add it to your calendar view.

That’s it. You can now view and update your SharePoint calendar in Outlook. Any changes made to the calendar on SharePoint or by other team members in Outlook will be shared with everyone.

There are a ton of other useful ways to extend the SharePoint Calendar, including adding interactive popup windows, linking it to forms or workflows, or creating responsive mobile calendars. Contact us for a free consultation to see what is possible.

Want more tips and tricks for construction project management professionals?

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And be sure to check out our previous tip to learn how to add a text box to a SharePoint page.