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Need help with Microsoft 365 for Construction Projects?

Consulting News |

More and more organizations are taking the leap to Microsoft 365. They see the benefits of having all of their company data securely stored in one location while accessing Microsoft's multiple services such as Teams, SharePoint, Project, and Office. They are also taking advantage of the Power Platform to create organization-specific customizations that they can readily distribute to users as joined-up solutions.

If your organization is one of those that have taken that first step and signed up for a Microsoft 365 subscription, congrats! Microsoft 365 has all of the tools you need to build an enterprise-scale organization or project solution. Now comes the hard part.

IT initiatives are not unlike any construction project. You need to design, budget, and have experts in the field with a successful track record that can deliver. Check out our series of blogs articles with tips and suggestions on using Microsoft 365 to manage your construction projects:

Expert help from Lydon Solutions on managing construction projects with Microsoft 365

Lydon Solutions has been delivering enterprise-scale Microsoft-based solutions for construction since 2009. We offer Microsoft 365 managed services to get you up and running at any point in your journey. We've delivered solutions for small organizations and fortune 500 companies ranging from a Power Automate workflow automating the review of daily reports to custom SharePoint program management solutions supporting multi-billion dollar projects.

While there are many IT companies out there, what makes us different is our consultants have both construction and IT experience. We've been there with you, and our solutions prove it. Check out our Microsoft 365 Managed Services or submit a free one-hour consultation request here.

Supporting a new Project Management Information System

How-To |

This is part four of four in a series of blogs called Tips on Deploying Construction Project Management Software for Your Organization.

In prior posts, we outlined the best practice to follow when rolling out a new Project Management Information System (PMIS) at your organization. Refer to the previous three articles for planning, evaluating technology, and implementing a PMIS. Now comes the often overlooked part of your journey: support.

Off-the-shelf solutions are pretty standard. Pay the monthly service level agreement fee, and off you go. The system dictates how you use it, requiring you to adjust your processes around it accordingly. You will need to monitor technology changes such as browser and device issues and storage, but for the most part, you should expect a consistent experience until you no longer do.

But what happens when you customize a solution? Or when your processes need to change after the system has been deployed? Over the past 11 years, we have seen this scenario play out in most, if not all, of our clients since our solutions can be highly configured and customized. There are some considerations to plan for before and after you implement a custom solution.

Tips to Better Support a Project Management Information System

Here are some things to keep in mind when planning support for your PMIS:

• Finalize business processes. You should revisit the business requirements documents and update them to represent the processes currently being used. Include adjustments as needed during the change control process. These documents feed training and are crucial to establishing scope management controls after implementation.
• Establish a ticketing system. Make sure to establish a ticketing process for collecting system and user issues. Ensure the ticketing system has enough data points to analyze the trending of requests by functionality, category, time to respond and close tickets, responsibility, and severity. This data will help target future enhancements, drive accountability, improve training and documentation, and ensure the users get the most out of the PMIS.
• Develop a knowledge center. Identify information and resources that you can provide for users as a ‘first port of call’ for support, such as FAQs, how-to videos, and training documents. Consider establishing a Center of Excellence and encourage key users to make themselves available to their colleagues for community support and knowledge sharing, helping triage many issues without opening a ticket.
• Implement change control. A change control process will be essential to prioritize new enhancements and fixes, update training material and requirements, and schedule future migrations and implementations.
• Develop a roadmap. Develop an enhancement roadmap for the system based on priority and cost-benefit analysis. Also, evaluate related technologies affected by the PMIS roadmap, such as versions of Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat, browser versions, etc.
• Simplify where needed. Frequently, the implemented PMIS can be overly complicated for the users. After using the system for six months or so, pause to assess usability. You may need to swing the control pendulum back to provide flexibility in what the system needs to track versus what you can handle using other legacy applications, such as email and Excel. Also, consider minimizing redundant functionality that may exist across your portfolio of systems or that your new PMIS can replace.
• Survey users. Reach out to users to find out what works and what does not work in the PMIS. Capture lessons learned and any suggestions for improvement. Surveys will help identify opportunities to adjust training based on responses.
• Communicate to users. Ensure regular communications with the users about system issues, changes to their processes, planned enhancements, and upcoming training sessions as needed.

We hope these tips will help you with your PMIS journey. Make sure to check out the prior articles of this series detailing upfront planning steps, technology to consider, and implementation strategies. In future posts, we will provide management tips for construction organizations to ensure the entire process stays on track. Stay tuned.

Get Expert Help Deploying the Right PMIS for Your Construction Organization

Implementing a construction Project Management Information System (PMIS) for your organization can be extraordinarily complex and costly without proper planning and management. If you have any questions or are looking for help implementing Microsoft 365 for construction, contact us for a free consultation. Alternatively, if you prefer a turnkey solution, checkout Construction Viz, our innovative app-based construction project management software solution powered by Microsoft Office and SharePoint.

Check out more blogs from Tips on Deploying Construction Project Management Software for Your Organization

Is Microsoft Yammer a Fit for Your Business?

Microsoft News |

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.

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.

Tips from the Field: List and Document Library Templates

Tips from the Field |

Have you ever wanted to create a standard document library in SharePoint with key columns for the project name, contractor, document types, and owner that you can reuse multiple times or import into another site? You can with SharePoint List and Document Library Templates.

Benefits of List and Document Library Templates in SharePoint

SharePoint’s List and Document Library Templates is a powerful feature that will help speed up site creation. There are many benefits to creating sets of list and library templates that you plan to reuse:

  • Standardize lists and document libraries settings (versions, check in check out, and so on)
  • Standardize lists and document library views.
  • Standardize metadata columns and content types across your content.
  • Include content in the template, such as previously created records, which could be helpful if you are creating an archive, backup, or phase of a project.
  • Reduce errors in rebuilding sites.
  • Accelerate time to build sites with repeatable tasks.
  • Export your list and library templates to other sites.

How to Create a List or Library Template in SharePoint

Creating a list or library template is relatively easy.  Make sure you define a template nomenclature in advance so you can easily determine the latest one to use when replicating. Then follow the steps below.

  1. Once you have created a list or library in SharePoint, go into Settings and click the “Save list as a template” link under the Permissions and Management column.

creating standard document library in SharePoint

2. Fill in the File Name (used when you export), Template Name (what will show in your Site Contents Apps), and a Template Description (a handy way to describe how you will use the template).   Note: make sure to use nomenclature that is consistent and easy to identify.

3. If you want to include the records that are currently in the list or library you created, click “Include Content.”

4. SharePoint will display a confirmation message if the creation step was successful.

5. Once created, your template is now available when you add an app under Site Contents.   You can now use it just like any other app.

Want to do more with Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365?

The Lydon Solutions team knows construction and IT.  Our team can help you keep ahead of your competition by getting the most out of technology solutions like SharePoint and Office 365. Contact us for a free consultation.

And if you need something turnkey, we also offer Construction Viz, a powerful construction project management solution with everything required to manage your construction projects, including document management, dashboards, reports, forms, workflows, and more. Construction Viz is available in the cloud, on-premise, or as à la carte apps deployable in Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint.

There is no Such Thing as a “SharePoint Developer”

Miscellaneous |

Yes, you heard it here: Don’t get fooled into hiring or contracting with an individual who claims to be a “SharePoint Developer” because there is no such thing.

Why? Working with SharePoint requires a broad range of skills beyond what any single person could realistically master.  If you want enterprise level solutions to manage your construction projects, what you really need is a team of experts that can help your organization unlock SharePoint’s full potential. Your best bet is to look for a company that has deep experience and broad expertise in SharePoint.

SharePoint's Capabilities

SharePoint is incredibly powerful. It is the number-one Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system in the world. On the surface, it looks simple and straightforward. That’s by design. Under the hood, however, it’s a different (and a complex) story depending on how and where you host SharePoint.

Just take a look at this partial list of SharePoint’s capabilities:

Content Management

  • List and library creation
  • Meta data
  • Retention

User Administration 

  • Account management
  • Permissions
  • Training

Architecture

  • Server administration
  • Security
  • Active Directory

Client-Side Development 

  • JavaScript, Angular, React, etc.
  • REST API
  • SDLC – build, test, deploy and support

Database 

  • SQL Server
  • Integration
  • Web services

Search 

  • Queries
  • Search properties and parameters
  • Search center

Reporting 

  • Third-party reports
  • SSRS/SSMS
  • Power BI

Forms 

  • List, infopath
  • Third party
  • Custom JS/VS

Workflow 

  • SharePoint designer/flow
  • Third party
  • Custom JS/VS

Each one of these areas requires years of experience to master and are rarely seen all together in any one individual.  This is why I say there is no such thing as a generic “SharePoint Developer.”

So what do you do if you want to use SharePoint to effectively manage your construction projects (and not just store your documents)?

Here are several approaches.

The first (and my recommendation) is to use a SharePoint-specific service provider like Lydon Solutions. We have people with experience and expertise in different areas of SharePoint so you can be assured your bases are covered.

Better yet, use our Construction Viz solution for SharePoint. This solution gives you full-featured construction management tools available right in SharePoint, on-premise or in the cloud, at a fraction of the cost of building your own environment.

If you prefer to do-it-yourself, here are suggestions on how to proceed:

  1. Separate business configuration from software development. Business configuration should be more focused on understanding your processes and document/content management than with software development. Business-configuration candidates should be client-facing, have a working knowledge of SharePoint, and understand construction and document control.
  2. Separate database development from client-side development. Typically, developers are stronger in one area or the other – so, if possible, separate database from the client-side development. Also, remember the software development lifecycle (SDLC). When it comes to developing custom solutions, you will need resources to not only build but also test and deploy any SharePoint solution (at a minimum).
  3. Decide whether the solution will be on-premise or online. If you go with Office 365, you will reduce your architecture needs since you won’t be managing servers. However, you will still have to manage your Office 365 tenant, integration, security, backups, and support, not to mention the continuing changes Microsoft makes to Office 365.
  4. Decide on your supporting software platforms. SharePoint is great in that you can build anything you want and its bad because you can build anything you want.  Commit to a standardized software platform for developing and deploying forms, workflow, and reporting.  This will allow specialization within your team and ensure a consistent experience for the users.

Choosing a SharePoint Development Partner

As stated before, you can eliminate all this work by using a provider like Lydon Solutions. We’ve been working with SharePoint for years and have experts in virtually every area of the platform. We can leverage its power to reduce your work and lower your costs for construction management.

If you want to learn more, contact us for a no-obligation consultation. And be sure to 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 delivered directly to your inbox.