Better AEC Collaboration Is Possible With Microsoft Teams

Understanding the Challenges, Benefits and Best Practices of using Microsoft Teams on your AEC Projects

In a rapidly evolving landscape where remote collaboration is the new norm, Microsoft Teams emerged as a powerful tool to connect dispersed teams, internally and externally, in the AEC. On this episode of the ProjectReady Podcast, join ProjectReady CEO Joe Giegerich and Head of Development Shaili Modi Oza as they discuss Microsoft Team’s administrative challenges, best practices, and intuitive features that make Teams an indispensable choice for fostering seamless collaboration in the AEC sector.

This podcast episode highlights the challenges faced by organizations in terms of Teams’ governance, security, and document management because without proper setup and governance, Teams can lead to ungoverned sprawl and security issues. Joe and Shaili share insights on how to organize Teams effectively and address security concerns to maximize its potential for your projects.

In addition, discover how ProjectReady’s innovative approach to integration extends and enhances the Teams experience, facilitating seamless integration, automated setup and added value to AEC professionals.

During this episode you will learn:

• The tools and benefits offered by Microsoft Teams to collaborate seamlessly by enabling teams to communicate, share documents, and work together from anywhere.
• The organizational challenges that can be brough on by Teams if not structured properly and best practices for establishing governance policies to ensure Teams are set up and managed correctly.
• Integrating Teams with the rest of Microsoft 365 as well as the other platforms you use on your projects.
• How to navigate the security challenges within Teams regarding shared documents when differentiating access for internal and external team members.

Check out these additional resources:

How To Maximize Microsoft 365 In The AEC

Master Your Metadata

Can The AEC Mend Its Relationship With SharePoint?

Contact Us Today For A Free Demonstration!

Transcript

Joe Giegerich: 

Hi everybody, this is Joe Giegerich again from ProjectReady. And with me as always is Shaili Modi Oza, our head of development. We’ve been doing a number of podcasts around the Microsoft stack, and today we want to spend a little time talking about Microsoft Teams and the AEC. Previous podcasts in this series were what we’re continuing here have been an overview of M365, a deeper dive into SharePoint and email. And an upcoming podcast that we have scheduled that I’m very excited for is it’s a modular world. And by which we mean the built world has been looking at modular construction for some time. It continues to grow, but isn’t your enterprise modular as well, or wouldn’t you have benefit therein as it relates to applications and how they work together? So that’s going to be the general gist of that next podcast. So, let’s begin with just the overall, what’s good amount Teams and how it fits. Collaboration in the AEC is always what it is. Challenging. You have people inside and outside the organization. You have a number of projects that come and go, different durations. 

And so obviously, particularly post pandemic, it’s a remote world as well. And so, Teams like for any other company is a huge part of the ability to collaborate remotely and particularly within the AEC. Even within one company, you may have offices in India, you may have offices in South America, even within your own firm, Teams is very important to create a coherent collaborative environment for your firm. Some of the challenges that we see are around the dispersed team members, which I just referenced. How do you handle collaboration and conversations, if you will, between internal and external users? And how can you bring all this to bear so that you can have a way to keep track of the tasks and the content and everything else that’s involved? So, Shaili, why don’t we just start with what’s good about Teams? And if you give it to me from your perspective. 

Shaili Modi-Oza: 

With Microsoft Teams, of course it’s the collaborative tool that the team members use for projects. And I think it’s a great tool, which is very easy to use, intuitive, it has great capabilities in terms of working together as a team where we can of course everything with Teams sending messages, but even working on documents together as a team, it has all these great capabilities to just basically collaborate easily. The ease of access, we can access it from the app, the browser, the phone, all of it just makes it a really great tool. 

But I think the difficult part is because it’s easy, it’s just the organization needs to make sure that it’s set up correctly so that we’ve heard so many stories where there are just so many Teams and people are not sure where they are kind of working off on for a project because people can create Teams really easily and it just becomes chaotic to manage all of these essentially. And people basically then just use the easy tool and have one channel across for everything, which then just doesn’t make the best use of Teams. And it’s not set up properly, which is what I see as a challenge with it. 

Joe: 

Yeah, it’s prone to what the traditional challenge with SharePoint was, which was ungoverned sprawl. Teams can be even more onerous. And so, to your point, do you use just one as a catchall with a whole bunch of different channels underneath? Do you have one for each individual project and department and how do you find it and how do you secure it is an issue. The other thing I want to mention as well though is just to take a step back as to what Teams really is, at least in my eyes. It’s essentially a unified user interface because Teams subsume what was formally in Skype. Behind it is SharePoint, that document library, which we’ll get to as being a bit of the wild, wild west. You can get to Outlook, you can get to meetings, you can get to all these things inside Teams. And I believe that was Microsoft was rolling out M365. Everything is very tightly knit. Everything is tightly knit inside or as it relates to Teams. They needed a way to bring together their stack in a way that people can interact with it, right? 

Shaili: 

Yeah, definitely. I think with the whole concept of M365 groups now, it has all come together really nicely with the team as well as the Outlook Group box, the SharePoint site. It’s all connected. And just by adding someone as a team member, it just gives them access to all of this, unifying it. So that’s definitely a good thing going on with Teams where we can have everything accessed from the one interface. 

Joe: 

Yeah. And it was interesting to me that as Teams was rolling out and we were getting ready to build ProjectReady, or we’re pretty much in the midst of the development at that point, what I found very interesting was I didn’t think it was that different from what we were doing on a certain level. So, we’re an integrated data environment, so we’re bringing together information from Autodesk, M365, Procore, Box, Bluebeam, et cetera. But what we are is this unified layer so that you can hit all these different applications in context, and that’s what Teams is. And I was pleased to see that at the time because it was validating, I think, for what we were doing. So, a question for you though, or a couple of things. So, what do you see as the challenges of Teams as it relates to any organization and particularly the AEC? 

Shaili: 

Yeah, I think definitely the biggest one is what we touched on a little bit before is how do you organize all the Teams while you’re using it? Would it be a single Teams with different channels versus different Teams and then private channels and public channels? And it’s all a bit confusing on what’s the best way to set it up. But what we’ve been working on, because we provision M365 and the whole stack behind it is that each project should have its own team. And just by separating that out, the whole interaction that happens between internal team members, external team members, it just makes that much more separated where each user has a separate Team for each project, and that also helps to organize the documents around it, any conversations, the group mailbox, it’s all in context of the project. So that’s I think, the biggest challenge that generally organizations are facing where how would they organize everything within Teams. 

Joe:  

Yeah. And specifically, though, two things that come to mind for me. So, for one, one of the advantages of having an individual Microsoft Teams channel and the like per project is it is an easier way to orchestrate security and information. But the downside of that is you’ll have a lot of channels, which is I think some of the things that people were trying to roll them all into one, or trying to avoid, but the security gets worse. If you have a catchall Teams team, I don’t know how you begin to make sense of security on that over time. And particularly in the AEC where you have people coming and going and going and coming. Our solution is our chain link that allows you to instantly go to any system connected right to where you got to go. So, we do have a solution for that. And even with that, talk to me a bit about the challenges around the security around documents. 

Shaili: 

Yeah. So with the Teams team that we create, it just has this default shared documents library on the backend of it, which is basically a shared library in the backend SharePoint site that gets provisioned with Teams and all the team members, any guests, anybody who’s added to the team essentially has access to the entire library that goes with it. And any other channels that get created are basically sub folders in the same library. So essentially, it’s like an open for all kinds of locations. And SharePoint, anybody who gets added to the team has access to everything in that library, which is a problem because you can’t security trim that in any way. It’s just everybody has access to everything, which is okay for any shared documents or things that do need to be shared, but it starts to create a problem. And there are guests and external users looking at files and documents that they shouldn’t have access to. 

Joe:  

And when you’re going across projects, that issue around security is multiplicative. If you roll them all in, again, I don’t even know what you would do, even if you separate them out, at least you have a little bit more control as to who’s working on this open Wild West library. Another thing that we solve for is you are well-served building out that SharePoint library structure and taxonomy that it’s just there, you click it, add SharePoint. You’re not adding SharePoint, you’re just exposing it in their UI. 

Shaili: 

Yeah. Yeah, and I think this is where the channels are not the answer because like I said, the channels just create sub folders in the same libraries. And if you create a private channel, Microsoft creates a whole other SharePoint site basically essentially a new site collection in the backend, which ends up being the same if you would be creating a new team. So, it just, it’s more organized that way if you’re creating new Teams. … 

Joe:  

Right. And it adds to the silo, right? Because if you create a private channel now there’s a whole nother cycle action. 

Shaili: 

Exactly. 

Joe:  

It’s one more silo on top, which is really killing the industry in terms of inefficiency. And I think one of the reasons why Microsoft took that approach was Box. If you read my Gartner Reports on the Dropbox and Box, it’s easy. So, everybody was using it. It’s also not terribly secure. So, Microsoft had to have, in my opinion, some answer to that competing stack. And what is nice to know, but they don’t really publicize this is that SharePoint, that library is a SharePoint site, and there’s nothing that prevents you from building that out and applying security. Now, the whole security piece we pick up in our SharePoint podcast and how we manage it based upon roles and the granular permissioning that we really simplified, but at least you have the opportunity there, right? Versus that one document library. 

Shaili: 

Definitely. 

Joe:  

So, we talked about the challenges of security in the document library. We mentioned that if you do it as a one-to-one to projects, you can end up with so many channels, you can’t find it unless you have ProjectReady, and obvious plug for a product. I guess the other question I would have for you is around the setup of Teams, because again, it’s a full on M365 group that gives you these other things. So, talk to me, if you will, about how if you didn’t have ProjectReady, what is the process and how do you deal with all the different connecting parts? 

Shaili: 

Yeah. Yeah. So just setting up a Teams team in M365 land is not that difficult where you would just go to your SharePoint central location, and you should be able to create a Teams team. The problem with that is it becomes open to all. And that’s where we’ve seen that users, if they have that access and they start creating a lot of Teams, it’s problematic because many times users don’t know that just by creating a Teams team, it creates all of these assets in the background where it creates a M365 group with a mailbox as well as a SharePoint site, and then it just adds a lot of clutter to the tenant. 

Joe:  

Right. It’s adding clutter to all those other stacks that Teams front ends. And what you’re referring to here is there’s not only the governance and security of the library, how do you govern even the creation of this where it’s either too locked down or too wide open? 

Shaili: 

Yep, that’s correct. So yeah, I think that’s definitely the first challenge of who would even have access to do that. And then making sure that it’s all set up correctly. Like we said, the powerful thing behind Teams is the SharePoint side that comes with it. And by default, if you create a Teams team, all you get is shared documents, one single library, which doesn’t really make sense for a real-life project. 

So, if you would use ProjectReady, we give all of these different options where you can apply a site template, you can add the correct team members, give them the correct roles, and then down to the library level security from all of that. And along with that, we provision the M365 group mailbox and Teams team as well. So just bring all this together. And within Teams we have a tab where ProjectReady is deployed. So, it’s just a lot of things around it that we do, which are more than if you would just go to SharePoint or Teams and create a new team. I think all of these additional steps give that layer of security and making sure that the Teams and projects are all created consistently. 

Joe: 

And more value to the end user. Because with ProjectReady, you click on the link, you go right to that specific channel, you can get to our application, which then bridges you to the other systems that we integrate as an integrated data environment. And there’s this just huge opportunity, there’s a ton of apps in Teams that we think people should look at. And even on that SharePoint site, you go, “Oh, well, how are they going to get there?” Well, if you’re not using ProjectReady, at least expose the tab. It’s easy enough to do. And I assume you can do that programmatically. Is that correct? 

Shaili: 

Yes, that’s correct. 

Joe: 

Yeah. So, what are some of the things you can do programmatically with Teams? 

Shaili: 

Definitely setting up these tabs. We have a tab for ProjectReady that we add programmatically. We can add the document libraries that the team would be using often as tabs. So definitely setting up all of these tabs. Another great feature that we have is we have task management in ProjectReady, and we can connect a ProjectReady task to a Teams meeting. And basically, just by scheduling a task and connecting it to a Teams meeting, they’re all connected now, and you can manage it where if the task moves, the meeting moves automatically, it schedules it in the correct channel, in the correct location with the correct team members. It just makes it that much more organized. 

Joe: 

Yeah. And this is what I was on about the efficiency for the end user, which ultimately puts money back in the institution’s pocket. Why do you have to… Because it frustrated me before we have that feature. I have a task in one system, but now I have got to set up a meeting, the task moves, the meeting doesn’t. And just solving that is a pretty substantial time saver, as well as the ability to quickly and accurately access information in the context of the project. And the reason why we’re able to do this, one other thing I’d like you to talk about a little bit, is the evolution of Teams in terms of the available APIs and actions and just where it was, where it is now and where it’s going. 

Shaili:  

Yeah, definitely. In terms of APIs, it has definitely made a lot more APIs available. With M365 bringing all these systems together, there is this single unified layer of graph APIs that we use basically to access Teams, M365 groups, the SharePoint, it’s all unified under the same graph APIs now, which gives us the ability to have all these features and give that access right from ProjectReady. 

Joe: 

Yeah, and it’s evolved as a stack. That’s kind of what I was driving at, right? It’s like SharePoint itself, Office 365 in M365, I should say. The APIs were okay, they were good, they’re better. They just keep evolving, much like the rest of just technology in general, because we talk about the integrated data environment and APIs and their impact on the industry. This is just across the board. And Microsoft, do you think Microsoft is at the fore of this? 

Shaili: 

Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And in terms of the way they have advanced all these APIs, I think Microsoft understands the need that all these integrations are needed, where programmatically we need to do all these things. So, it’s not just Teams, but like you said, in general, all the graph APIs have evolved very, very quickly in the last few years, for sure. 

Joe: 

And I think this is a good segway to wrap up. So, to that, it’s a modular world. The reason why manufacturers of software platforms and the like are releasing so many APIs and making this so widely available, is because they recognize they must coexist. That one application is not the only application you’re going to use in the management of your business, in any business, let alone the AEC. And so, on that basis, I mean, it’s a modular world, and that’s what we’ll get to in our next webcast. We’re lining up some guest panelists as we speak, but that’s the point is so Teams let you wrap and bring things together. We do that on top of that. 

And what it does is I think it liberates the enterprise to start to make smart decisions about best of breed, not to add more silos, not to add more applications, but not to become overly reliant in applications that overreach. You have a great ERP. Why are you going to them for document control? Well, the way they figure it is, and it’s understandable, it’s business. They have clients, they have contacts, it’s an upsell motion, but I don’t think that’s always the best thing for our customers within the enterprise. And so anyway, I’ll leave it at that. It’s a segue to the next podcast. As always, we thank you for coming out to listen to these things. Stay tuned and we’ll have a regular series going. Talk to you next time.