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SharePoint for construction

Don’t Mess with Default Content Types in SharePoint

Tips from the Field |

Most of our “Tips from the Field” are how-to guides to help novice SharePoint users better support their construction projects. This tip is different because it focuses on avoiding a problem that can have dramatic consequences. In short, don’t mess with the default content types.  Read on to learn why, and also how to properly configure custom content types if necessary.

Changing Default Content Types Can Break Your SharePoint Site

SharePoint’s default content types are the foundation of SharePoint apps, lists, and libraries. Content types define behavior and include various columns by default. SharePoint users who modify default content types can render an entire site unusable if done incorrectly. (Yes, you read that right.)

To illustrate, let’s look at a document library, which includes a “document” content type by default. If you don’t see a similar view, make sure “management of content types” is activated in the advanced settings of your document library.

content types in Sharepoint

If you click on the “Document” hyperlink under the Content Type column, you’ll see the included fields and attributes. For example, the screenshot below shows that the document content type has the “Name” and “Title” fields, and that name is a required field. 

So, whenever you add documents to this library, it will enforce the attributes of the document content type, and “Name” will be a required field (as denoted by a star).

content types in Sharepoint

With the right permissions, you can modify and add to the default content type, which will change the behavior of that specific document library.

So what’s the big deal?  There are several implications for modifying the document content type at the document library (content) level:

  • Library setting vs. content type. Changing the configuration of the library settings can conflict with modifications made to the default document content type.  For example, different columns could become required fields. This can result in documents being automatically checked out or disappearing.
  • Differences between libraries. Unless you drill into the document content types within the document library, you will have no idea why one library works differently than another. On the surface, they can look exactly the same.
  • Content type hierarchy. Document content types with the same name reside at the content hub or site collection. Sites, lists, and libraries inherit default content types from their parents, so behavior cascades from the highest to the lowest level. If you modify a specific app’s default content type at the document library level, any subsequent changes made at the hub or site collection will overwrite the document library content type. So, lists and libraries will be inconsistent.
  • SharePoint software updates. SharePoint software updates, when applied, could overwrite functionality for the default content types.

So, what do you do about it?  Do not modify the default content types. Instead, you can add your own custom content types.

How to Add Custom Content Types

If you are going to use content types, create new ones at the highest level (hub, site collection or site) for reuse and add them to the document library at the content level. If you click on “Add” from the existing site content types, you can select from the existing content types.

content types in Sharepoint

Choose the content type from the Groups and click “Add” to move each type from the left to the right box. Then click “OK.”  For example, see the project documents content type in the image below.

Once you add a new content type to your document library, you can make it the default setting for that library. From that point forward, every time you add a new document to that library it will use your new content type. Alternatively, you can also have your new content type appear as an option when a user clicks the “New” button to add a document. Both of the above methods will ensure the default document content type stays intact and you can easily see when a new one is being used instead of the default, making it easier to troubleshoot any problems.

If you want to know more, ask questions in the comments below.

Managing content types is an important part of using SharePoint for construction management, and one of the many ways Construction Viz makes your job easier. Contact us for a free consultation.

And be sure sign up for our monthly newsletter in the footer below to get our latest blog updates, tips on using Microsoft SharePoint, and other useful info.

What’s New in SharePoint 2016

Reviews |

Here’s what construction professionals need to know about the latest features in SharePoint 2016.

Microsoft just announced the Release Candidate (RC) version of SharePoint 2016. Below is a preview of a few of the cool new features now available in the latest version of the SharePoint platform.

Ready for on-premises, cloud or hybrid environments 

SharePoint 2016 continues Microsoft’s “mobile first, cloud first” strategy. The platform is chock full of powerful enhancements for cloud and mobile users.

But not everyone is ready to embrace the cloud for compliance or security reasons. This is something we know is true for many of our clients in the construction industry.

Good news. SharePoint 2016 remains a viable option for on-premises environments.

As more and more features are added to SharePoint online, many companies will find moving the Cloud irresistible.

That’s OK. SharePoint 2016’s hybrid model provides a ‘bridge’ between on-premises and cloud environments. This is ideal for organizations that aren’t ready to embrace the cloud just yet, but don’t want to be left behind.

Instead of bringing organizations up to the Cloud, the hybrid approach brings the Cloud down to the organization. We’re already seeing a lot of excitement among the companies we work with for this option.

Best New Features in SharePoint 2016 

Here is a quick rundown of a few of the major new features available in SharePoint 2016:

  • Large File Support – The old SharePoint limit of 2GB files is no more. SharePoint 2016 now allows uploads of files up to 10GB in size.
  • Improved File Sharing – SharePoint 2016 includes UX enhancements for creating and sharing folders. Site members can now share folders.  Seeing who has access to a folder is easier. And the email process for sharing is also streamlined. Share invitations and requests for access can be approved or denied via emails using a single-click.
  • Image and Video Previews – Clicking or hovering over a media file automatically generates a preview in the document library.
  • Extended Filename Support – File names can include special characters, leading dots and GUIDs and are no longer limited to 128 characters.
  • Site Page Pinning – Users can pin sites they access often on their sites page. When a user follows a site (either online or on-premises) they get pinned in the same place.
  • Simpler OneDrive for Business Controls –  Users can perform common tasks (e.g. creating new Office documents or synchronizing, uploading, or sharing files) with a single click in OneDrive for Business.
  • More Powerful Search – Search can index up to 500,000,000 items per Search Server Application.
  • Site Folders View –  Users can directly access document libraries in sites they are following from within OneDrive for Business.
  • Document Library Access –  It is now even easier to move around a site with improved keyboard shortcuts, page landmarks and navigation links.
  • Expanded Scalability –  Content databases can store up to 100,000 site collections.
  • Web Application Open Platform Interface Protocol (WOPI) –  Users can create, rename and share files from within the WOPI iframe on the browser page.
  • 5000 Item List View Threshold – Indexed columns ensure that large lists no longer cause issues.

You can read more about the SharePoint Server 2016 release candidate on the Microsoft Office Blog.

Learn About SharePoint 2016 for Your Organization

Ready to deploy a complete SharePoint PMIS solution for your project team? Contact us for a Free Consultation.

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

Create Interactive Visio Diagrams with SharePoint

How-To |

Here’s a powerful way your project team can share interactive diagrams and process flow charts using Microsoft Visio and SharePoint.

If you’ve read our blog before, you know that Microsoft SharePoint is the ideal enterprise Project Management Information System (PMIS) for managing major projects. Plus, it has the added benefit of out-of-the-box integration with the Microsoft Office applications you use every day.  This is why Microsoft SharePoint is the platform powering our award-winning Lydon Solutions Construction Program Management Portal.

We’ve already shown you what the super-duo of Microsoft Excel and SharePoint can do for project teams. Now we’ll introduce you to the super-powered potential of another of Microsoft’s premier Office products. Read on to learn how Microsoft Visio can seamlessly integrate with SharePoint to create a complete solution for you and your team.

Create and Share Interactive Visio Diagrams Using Microsoft SharePoint
You’re probably familiar with Microsoft Visio as a tool for creating business diagrams. Your company likely uses Visio for things like office layouts, org charts and process flow diagrams. Wouldn’t it be great if these types of diagrams could be easily shared and kept always up-to-date? They can be – even if most of your team doesn’t have Visio installed.

Creating and sharing interactive Visio diagrams is simple with Microsoft SharePoint. Assume you have a business diagram created in Visio. Now you want to share that diagram with your team. Microsoft SharePoint Visio Services allows you to connect SharePoint and Excel data with Visio objects. You can then web enable your connected diagram inside SharePoint.

Presto! Your team now has an interactive diagram viewable in SharePoint. Team members don’t even need to have Visio installed in order to view and interact with it in SharePoint. Better still, your Visio diagram will automatically update when changes are made in Excel or SharePoint.

Pretty nifty, right? But how does this feature help you? Consider two common construction project scenarios.

Scenario 1:  Interactive Gate Process
Let’s say you have a gate approval process for your program. It includes all the steps needed to obtain approval for a project.  You have standard templates in Excel, Word, or InfoPath that must be completed at each gate.

You can use Microsoft SharePoint Visio Services to easily turn a manual process into an interactive one. First, link the documents for each gate in your Visio flow diagram. Then post the linked gate process flow diagram to SharePoint. And you’re done.

You’ve created an interactive gate process diagram in just a couple steps. Your users can access the gate diagram in SharePoint to easily pull down the template required at each step in the process.

Below is a sample using the PMI knowledge Areas:


Scenario 2:  Interactive Org chart
Manually updating org charts can be a pain. So make the process dynamic. Use Microsoft SharePoint Visio Services to link your org chart diagram to a contact list. Now your Visio org chart will automatically update when your contact list changes.

You can take it step further and create an always-up-to-date office layout diagram. Simply link a row of data in Excel or a SharePoint List to your Visio office layout diagram and upload to SharePoint. You’ve now created a relationship between location and contact information.  When users are modified in the contact list, both your Visio org chart and office diagram will automatically display the updates.

Below is a sample of an office layout linked to an Excel Contact list:

Save Time and Money on Your Construction Projects
Ready to deploy a complete SharePoint PMIS solution for your project team? 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.

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.

10 Reasons Construction Project Management Information Systems Fail

How-To |

Most construction specific Project Management Information Systems (PMIS) implementations fail. This will not be welcome news if your company just spent tens of thousands of dollars implementing one. But we meet a surprising number of construction managers and owners who are unhappy with their current PMIS deployment. They typically come to us for help after discovering that their fancy new project management system is too costly and complex to implement. Worse yet, no one at their company wants to use it because it doesn’t help them do their jobs better.

We’ve had these conversations many times over the years – enough to know that the construction management landscape is sadly riddled with expensive and ineffective PMIS solutions.

How did the construction industry get to this point? We outline 10 reasons below. If you’re considering updating or implementing a PMIS at your construction company, we hope these tips help make the process smoother. In our next blog post, we’ll also share our vision for how a proper PMIS solution should be designed and implemented.

Top Reasons why Construction Project Management Information Systems fail:

  1. The system is not flexible.  Many PMIS solutions force a team to manage a project in a specific way. The reality is that most companies, projects, and people do things differently. Processes also evolve over time. A PMIS system should be flexible and adaptable – without requiring expensive custom coding.
  2. Internal politics prevent adoption.  Multiple departments are involved with managing a project. Each one has its own specific workflows and software platforms. Implementing a “one-size-fits-all” PMIS across these disparate groups often leads to resistance and lack of adoption. But who can blame them? Deploying a new software tool that doesn’t integrate with other departments’ existing platforms is making more work for them, not less. So everyone falls back on manually importing and exporting Excel files to collaborate. Not exactly a gain in efficiency.
  3. The systems lack internal support.  Individuals who are involved with projects from requirements through implementation make ideal project champions for choosing the proper PMIS. These champions are critical to helping a product gain acceptance in the organization and creating grass roots acceptance.  Without internal support, systems “die on the vine” only to be replaced with another expensive system that never gets implemented.  The system is blamed for the failure and not the organization.
  4. Companies don’t understand what they have.  Project managers and executives are busy. They often simply don’t have the time or technical skills to evaluate the capabilities of their current tools. So they bring in a consultant. But most consultants make money selling fancy new software platforms as well as the services required to deploy and customize them. But this approach overlooks the most efficient and effective option: improving the PMIS solution that the company already owns.
  5. A company’s IT department “locks down” the application.  Once a PMIS is absorbed into a company and hosted on their internal servers, the IT department takes over managing the tool. Further customization and feature requests from users are too often stifled or delayed. Users then have one more reason to not use the tool.Blog Quotes Construction Project Management Information Systems
  6. Business requirements are not valued.  Many companies jump into buying an expensive PMIS solution thinking that the software itself will fix their issues. They then task the implementation of the system to those in the organization that know the least – usually the “newbies” since other subject matter experts are busy running projects.  But this immediately devalues the product.  A system is only as good as the people that develop and support it. There must be commitment to the entire software development lifecycle for a product to be successfully adopted in an organization. Without knowledge of the business processes, proper training, and acceptance by the organization, all enterprise software systems will fail
  7. The wrong team is implementing the solution.  Software development and implementation is a unique craft.  Most construction professionals think they can do it because they managed a construction project. But the truth is they lack the technical experience to do the implementation right. On the flip side, IT companies that don’t know construction and try to build solutions often fail because they build tools that are not grounded in how work is actually performed in the field. A PMIS will fail without the expertise of the right team that knows both construction and how to implement software.
  8. The solution lacks a unified vision.  Companies typically buy the “best of breed” software to do specific things (dashboards, cost, contracts, etc.). Then they end up using only 5% of each systems’ functionality because the rest of the features don’t fit their needs and don’t integrate with other systems. We’ve heard horror stories of team members using up to 10 different systems to do their job – many of which become corporate mandates that make doing their job even harder.  What ends up happening? These individuals enter the least amount of information they can get away in these mandated systems, but ultimately end up doing their real job in Excel. Again, less efficiency, not more.
  9. Management is sold an “out-of-the-box” lie.  Every consulting and software company will claim to offer a one-size-fits-all solution. But there is no such product.  Most, if not all, PMIS deployments are custom coded. Each and every change will be expensive and make the tool more difficult to update in the future. The consultants you hired to install and configure your new PMIS will never leave because the platform is too complex for your in-house IT to manage. Ultimately, the cost to develop and maintain the product will become its downfall.
  10. Companies try for the Hail Mary.  Companies too often try to do too much when they deploy PMIS solutions. Instead of getting the small win, they end up in a state of constant re-engineering.

A better way to implement your Construction Project Management Information System

As we can see, the challenges and resulting opportunities that the construction industry faces in choosing a new PMIS are numerous. Stay tuned, because in our next blog post we will explain how to successfully implement a PMIS solution. The final blog post in our series will share how construction professionals can use solutions already deployed at their organization – tools like Microsoft SharePoint and Excel – to avoid these pitfalls and achieve better results.