Maximize Your Construction Project Information Management Strategy … Make Microsoft 365 Work For the AEC
Did you know, if you’re using Outlook to send and receive email, you already own Microsoft 365? And, if you already own it, why would you not want learn how to make Microsoft 365 work for the AEC?
When deployed and setup correctly, M365 can be a great driver for better efficiency and information management at your organization. Unfortunately, with all the M365 products on your plate, like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, etc., it’s easy to get overwhelmed. On this episode of the ProjectReady Podcast ProjectReady CEO Joe Giegerich & Head of Product Development Shaili Modi Oza discuss all things M365 and the AEC.
Listen to this episode to learn common challenges AEC teams face when trying to implement a M365 strategy. Then uncover what’s possible with SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook. The duo will also reveal some best practices for getting started with M365 at your organization. You’ll also hear how today’s APIs make it possible to seamlessly integrate M365 with the rest of your project tech ecosystem.
After listening to this episode of the ProjectReady podcast, you’ll gain a better understanding of:
- The challenge of utilizing Microsoft 365 on AEC projects.
- Best practices for the use of SharePoint, Teams and Outlook.
- Microsoft APIs and their ability to bring project systems together.
Note: This is Part of a special podcast series on “Microsoft 365 and the AEC”. You can click here to see the rest of the series which covers SharePoint, Microsoft Teams and Email management with Outlook.
Sign Up For Updates
Contact Us Today For A Free Demonstration!
Transcript
Joe Giegerich:
All right, everybody. Thank you for joining our next podcast here today. We’re going to be doing a series of podcasts, particularly on this topic that pivots from M365 itself. We have a very long pedigree of what we’ve done in the space, how we started, and we can get to all that. But there’s a lot of value in M365, but there’s also a number of challenges. And so today we just want to talk on a high level, the different components, the advantages it brings to the AEC, and discuss some of the challenges. And then next go around, we’ll look at SharePoint, we’ll look at Teams, Outlook and how we got there. So that would be a nice series that we want to share with you folks.
So I’m Joe Giegerich. I’m the CEO and founder of ProjectReady. With me today is Shaili Modi Oza, our lead developer and the genius behind what we have built. And so with that, Shaili, so you work with our customers all the time, and ProjectReady brings together M365 and ACC and Procore, we’re really an integrated data environment at that point. But M365 is something that we really started from as it goes back to SharePoint on-prem. And so talk about though M365 and some of those tools and where you think they’re applicable for the AEC.
Shaili Modi Oza:
Yeah, definitely. And as you said, we started with on-prem, but moved on to Office 365, which now with M365 is even more integrated and it brings together all of these different services from Microsoft making it so much better to bring all of that content together with SharePoint, be it the M365 groups and your Outlook as well as Microsoft Teams, all of your-
Joe:
And Azure, the ability to build modern apps. I mean, you mentioned we came from SharePoint on-prem. Back in the day, all these products were separate. I mean, Teams was really, what was it again? Communicator, I can’t remember offhand. Became Skype. Anyway, these were all separate things. And so getting all these systems to talk together, locked on-prem really kind of was not great. And so M365, it’s really a connected platform. And this is something I often like to say is that M365, the sum is greater than the parts, and that’s what Microsoft has really revolutionized. Anyway, I want to turn it back to you.
Shaili:
Definitely one of the biggest benefits, I would say, going to M365, of course, is that everything is now in the cloud in the last few years how businesses have moved. And we would think that having that flexibility where all of this content, be it in Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, it can be accessed from anywhere and any device that makes it so much better as well. And while being on the cloud as well, because it’s all M365, it is very secure. They have the standard two factor multifactor authentication. So just the whole flexibility of making sure that everything is secure yet available on the cloud and easily available just makes it so much better for users to just easily get to what they need to in a secure manner as well.
Joe:
Yeah. And the pandemic obviously pushed the cloud over the edge in terms of everybody had to go to the cloud very rapidly. We witnessed that. But in terms of the product itself, let’s take a quick beat on SharePoint for instance. What are some of the aspects of SharePoint that just pretty much have value to everybody, but with regard to the AEC?
Shaili:
So I would say at the highest level, SharePoint, it’s one of the best repositories where you can store your documents and content. So in terms of the document repository, it is a pretty good backend and the direct integration that it has with the Microsoft products, like with the Word Excel, PowerPoint files, users can save all of these documents within SharePoint and you could have multiple document libraries, set it up in a way that makes sense for your organization. And as we work with customers, we kind of try to understand what would make sense in terms of what would be the libraries and the list-
Joe:
Yeah, the taxonomy.
Shaili:
… and the metadata columns, the taxonomy, and making sure that that stays consistent basically across different sites as we start to set that up. That’s really important.
Joe:
Just to go to taxonomy and SharePoint as well, some of the challenges, which are really apropo to mention now is how do you roll out a consistent taxonomy? How do you run the best taxonomy? How do you secure it? And for us, SharePoint is really specific to the project in large measure. And one of the things that I’ve witnessed along with you is you’ll have people, they have one site, some libraries, and they just jam stuff in there and it just does not scale. But the reason why they do that is because to roll out a dedicated site per project requires somebody to do it and manage the security. So how do you see SharePoint and its utility on the project?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. And yeah, making sure that that taxonomy is set up correctly, and it’s not just everything is saved in the one documents library and the file folders. I think that that’s pretty important. But even with that, it just makes managing all of these different aspects of the projects, like you could have your legal documents in one library, if you have other kind of content like images and videos, you could have a separate library for that. With the metadata it just makes it easy to then search for all of this content. It makes that really powerful where you can search different files or documents across all of these sites. And I would say that we could just additionally have flows around it to just make sure that if there is any particular process that needs to be handled at the SharePoint level, we can take care of that. The file sharing because of the security makes it possible that-
Joe:
Yeah. If you can stop that for a second. But what we see over and over again, and some of it is security is, so if it’s better to have a repeatable taxonomy and organization of content and a project having its own site, why then do most people not do that? What are the challenges that’s prohibiting them from taking that on? And then one of the things just to add as well, you all own SharePoint. If you’re using Microsoft Exchange, which I think 98% of the planet does for business at this point, you already own it. I just think here to four, a lot of people didn’t think to use SharePoint and then up against some of the challenges of SharePoint, that’s why they don’t adopt a repeatable, scalable taxonomy.
Shaili:
Yeah, I definitely think that for someone who’s new to SharePoint, initially it does seem like it is very difficult to set up. But once it is set up correctly, it makes it so much easier to use. And I think because of that initial setup complications or difficulties, users end up going the easier route where when you create a Teams team, it just comes with the documents tab and they end up just using that one library putting in a whole-
Joe:
And what’s the challenge with that? I mean, why…
Shaili:
… the structure. Yeah.
Joe:
But I have my own objection to this. What is the challenge specifically on that document library in Teams? And for what it’s worth, folks, this is really their integrated approach. Teams is kind of like a wrapper, a UI wrapper, user interface. Behind Teams, that document library is a full SharePoint site, but the only thing in it is this one document library. And how do you control security on that, Shaili?
Shaili:
You cannot essentially, because anybody who gets added to the team basically has access to everything in there. So that’s where it gets difficult because then it’s just everything is open, basically. That’s the only way to add people. You add people to the team as owners or members, and they would essentially have access to all the documents in that library.
Joe:
Everything.
Shaili:
Correct.
Joe:
And so at that point, if that’s all I had to work with, I would try to find other systems. I mean, even Dropbox, because there’s no way you can segregate information in a secure way when you’re just using that one library. Now, so how do you handle that challenge on the SharePoint side?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. So as you mentioned before, Joe, that it has the whole SharePoint site behind it. It’s just a matter of setting up that SharePoint site correctly because we can definitely add more libraries to it. And then at the library level, we can security trim the content depending on who needs access to what. And if we still need the Teams integration, Teams has the capacity to add additional libraries as tabs. So there are definitely all of these different ways where we can still, depending on how the users like the interface, we can either just bring them to SharePoint, we can still load things in Teams. So there are a lot of these different ways we can bring these two together as well as make sure that all the content is security trim properly as well.
Joe:
Yeah, so that is the challenge. So the answer to this is behind that team site, build it out and put in libraries that are germane and that you can control more granular permissions on. All right folks. So sum it up really quickly. You all own it. That Teams document library means that you have a SharePoint site. It’s just the one library is too wild. And so these challenges we’ll go into greater depth on our next series and then talk about how we explicitly help with those challenges so that you can have a better taxonomy and scale. So I went a lot into SharePoint. I love SharePoint. I’ve been working in the space in the SharePoint world since 2005. But there are other components that we want to speak to on a high level. And again, we’ll go into greater depth, a subsequent podcast. So Teams, we mentioned Teams, and Teams, like everything at M365 is just in utterly connected to everything else, but what are some of the things in Teams that an AEC project would have benefit of? And then with that, some of the challenges?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely starting with what are the benefits? So it’s a great collaboration tool, for sure, where we can bring together all the different team members who are working on the project, and it gives this seamless experience where everybody can stay connected with, of course, the direct integration to SharePoint, access to all of the different project documents is easily available as well. So right from Teams, they give you the ability to connect it to the different aspects of the SharePoint site, just not the documents library, but the other libraries as well. So-
Joe:
You can expose the SharePoint site. We embed our solution as a tab inside that channel, and it’s very extensible. I mean, just in general, the availability of APIs from Microsoft is really second to none. And that’s another real advantage that people want to take part of. I mean, if it’s a integrated world you need to live in, you need APIs to integrate. But anyway, Teams has a number of these. I mean, the whole stack does. And it’s because of that that we’re able to roll them out, secure them, add our own application as a interface inside Teams, and then Teams itself. I mean, there are certain things that really don’t bear explanation. You can chat, you can have a video conference and you can share documents easily, but it’s the extensibility of Teams, I think.-
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. And along with the sharing, I would add to that that because of the full integration of M365, not just sharing of documents, but even the collaboration and working on the files while you are on a meeting or within chat, it just makes that collaboration much more effective where you’re working on the documents. And then there are a lot of additional integration in the M365 Teams. As well they’re adding more and more apps. So it just makes that whole integration that much more powerful users who just need to stay in Teams can just essentially stay there-
Joe:
That was my point.
Shaili:
… and still be able to access everything they need.
Joe:
It’s a UI wrapper, right? Behind Teams is a whole bunch of different stack. Now, as to the challenges though, one of the big challenges I see is that do you create a Teams channel? It is the right term, right, Shaili? Channel?
Shaili:
I would just say Teams team, because within a team there are channels.
Joe:
Teams. Teams. Teams. Teams.
Shaili:
Yeah, just a team, I guess. Yeah. Creating a team.
Joe:
So yes, when you create SharePoint Teams, whatever, there’s a whole Office 365 group behind it and all these other pieces. But you can really over time, if you’re not judicious and booting up a Teams, Teams, Teams, Teams, Teams, if you’re not judicious about booting up Teams, you’ll end up with so many different nodes within Teams. You won’t be able to find anything. So that’s also one of the other challenges is when and how easily can you turn it on? And how do you make sure you can find the appropriate Teams team quickly? If you’re using this for projects and you have a hundred projects, you’re going to have a hundred Teams channels if you’re not careful. So that’s one of the things that we address. And what we generally try to do is to take the best of and then corral it. It’s like a wild horse. You just got to get it to ride with you and connect to the horse and make it work for you. Is there anything else you want to add on Teams at that point or?
Shaili:
Yeah, I definitely agree with making sure that we create the correct number of Teams, because that’s one of the biggest problems we’ve seen as we work with customers, where many times you have the same team members across projects and people aren’t sure, do you create one team to work across projects or otherwise if there are too many Teams, people get confused where they’re supposed to be communicating. But we make that better by setting that up automatically and having the team and context of the projects so that all the project related documents and any conversations stay in context of a project. It just helps to make sure that that is set up in a consistent way so that the users can find all of the information and communicate effectively, essentially.
Joe:
Yeah. And back to metadata, I mean, the way you keep things in context to a project is by having centralized metadata and a scalable taxonomy against it, which is our last podcast. It’s the secret sauce of everything, and in particular in M365. So one of the ways you address that challenge is to bind everything to one ID, which is something that we do, and then roll these things out automatically programmatically so that you can have it consistent and templated, and then you have to develop some way for people to go directly to that Teams quickly in the context of the project.
Email. So email, I don’t know why I always do this last, but everybody has the challenges. Email, people are going to continue to use it, people are going to continue to send attachments, and you’re going to have to send attachments via email. I can tell you that one of the pain points I have is that if you’re sending content from SharePoint, you have to download zip files, navigate to different libraries if you want to go to taxonomy, that’s something we do solve for and connect and attach. A little bit of a shameful plug there, but talk about the advantages of Outlook and some of the challenges around that.
Shaili:
Well, advantages of Outlook, I would say that everybody, as you mentioned, Joe, still relies a lot on emails. Even though we have all of these collaborative tools, the simplest way to send out documents is you send an email and we have customers who have so many people sending in documents as attachments through emails, and it just creates a lot of chaos because it’s not an organized way to get the content. It’s just an email with attachments, and you need to make sure that they are tracked properly, they’re logged, the documents are brought in to the correct project with the correct metadata, just so it doesn’t get lost in your email inbox. So I think while it is the easy tool and the one that is used most often, it’s also the one that’s most difficult to manage because it’s not as organized as it should be.
Joe:
Yes. And that’s just the ad hoc nature of email itself. And so one of the great advantages of Microsoft’s Exchange Stack really is what Outlook is in this regard is that it supports applications. Again, APIs and metadata is the cure for this. And that is one of the great things about, as it relates to Outlook, if you will, APIs and metadata, right? APIs are everywhere and available. And so in our case, we have an app, it doesn’t require client side deployment. You log into a browser, there are all your workflows to manage that email. The good part is Outlook allows you to build things to do this. The bad part is that they’re just not there off the shelf. And if you have the right metadata, then you can route email correctly. Again, that’s scalable taxonomy. Anything to add Shaili or?
Shaili:
No, I think that’s all great. The only other thing I would add with Outlook is, again, with the integrated environment that we’ve been talking about with M365-
Joe:
Yeah. The group mailbox, I forgot all about it.
Shaili:
Exactly. So the M365 group that brings everything together has the group mailbox, and that is one of the easiest way to keep all of these emails in context of the project. So definitely, that’s something that once it is set up and users are getting these emails in their inbox, but just by moving them to the group mailbox, it just makes it that much more integrated and brings the associated content together in context of the project.
Joe:
Yeah. And it has its own email address. It’s like a public folder except smarter. But if you do that, you also have the same challenge you have with Teams where you can’t find the group mailbox you need to find quickly. Because if one person is naming a project Bob’s project and somebody else’s Bob’s project 1, 2, 3, 4, there’s no consistency and there’s no tieback of metadata to support that taxonomy. So that is a great feature. It’s how you exploit it is the challenge, but people solve it, like us. One other thing, so we talk about the challenges within M365, it’s the ease of use or the ease of ability to administer security, to have consistency around metadata, project nomenclature, a whole series of things that we’ve referenced. And so with that institutions, what should an institution do when they’re looking at this? I mean, they can try to build solutions themselves, look for products like our own, which I’ve already done a lot of this, but here, if you were just doing a custom job for a customer, how would we start this with planning?
Shaili:
Yeah. So we definitely start with planning and trying to understand the day-to-day use case of what the organization, of how the projects need to be organized. What are the different libraries as we discussed earlier that make the most sense? And the way ProjectReady brings it all together is we have roles which are mapped to libraries and the team members and how it all comes together. Talk about that or no?
Joe:
No, no, just stop there for a second because this is something I want to go into greater depth on a subsequent series. Let me lead the witness. So we have this client construction management that also required some power platform builds around it. It was a very integrative project. It was actually a lot of fun. But how did we approach them? How did we get our client in sync with themselves, if you will, to approach the final outcome of a integrated data environment?
Shaili:
Yeah, it’s definitely figuring out the process flow of what needs to happen and how all of these systems, while they are integrated in an organization, there are different team members using these different aspects of M365 separately and how things need to flow from, let’s say an email to SharePoint and what needs to be done within Teams. And if there are any additional processes like you mentioned with Power Automate, how they all need to come together and just mapping that out.
Joe:
And other systems other than M365, because that is the utter reality within the AEC is, you got to get your M365 house in order. But when you’re looking at what kind of taxonomy you’re going to roll out, you mentioned people work in different work streams, people work in different platforms as well.
Shaili:
Definitely. Yeah.
Joe:
So we bring together ACC, we bring together Procore, and part of that journey did involve that commonality even across the other platforms. So you could drive M365 in sync with those other systems. So how did we go about gathering that information?
Shaili:
So we would start by definitely understanding the use cases and which team members are using which different functionalities and what are the different data points across the projects that are… Essentially everybody is using different systems and managing the data separately. But making that mapping of information of how it all comes together in context of the project is what we do when we work with the customer and do a series of meetings and discussions, try to map that out and prepare that plan of how it will all come together.
Joe:
And that plan, the topic here today is ostensibly M365, but if you want to know what the desired end state of the taxonomy, the setup of SharePoint should be, and the AEC, it’s not just that, right? It’s to get SharePoint to work, you need to have some alignment to a ACC or Procore or Fieldwire or one of these other systems in flight.
Shaili:
Definitely. All of these systems, while they are separate, but in the context of the project, there are documents and all of these different places. So sometimes we need to sync over the documents from one system to another. Sometimes it’s just bringing all of those data points together in a report to see at a project level what’s going on. But it’s definitely bringing all of these different systems as well as M365 together and making them work essentially for the project.
Joe:
Yeah, if you have the equivalent metadata, if it’s consistent between the two various systems and can scale, that’s a big part of the M365 setup, is for one, who’s living in what system? And for two, how should SharePoint reflect the project and the way you understand the project in a way that’s consistent with other platforms? So on our next podcast, we will be focusing much more on SharePoint, actually exclusively to the extent that you can, given that M365 is connected. And looking at specific things like common things that come up, how many libraries do you need? We’ll talk about how you determine that, what the sweet spot is. Sometimes people use metadata as a library, sometimes libraries as a metadata.
And we’ll talk about the taxonomy of library setup. And with that, the ongoing challenge of from the get go and to the end of the project, the security around that. And another thing we’ll talk about is how you even want to name your sites, what you want to do with that information. Again, more taxonomy brought back into the context of SharePoint and we’ll talk about a whole bunch of other things, but those are some ones that just come up very commonly that we do want to touch on. So with that, I’m Joe Giegerich, Shaili Modi Oza. See you next time and look forward to continuing to have our podcast series with you. Thank you.
Shaili:
Thank you.