Are You Getting All You Can Out Of SharePoint And Your Microsoft 365 Investment?
SharePoint is renowned for its collaborative features, making it one of the best tools for storing files and documents while allowing teams to work together seamlessly. Its integration with the rest of the M365 stack enhances its capabilities giving it the potential to be a great tool to help with the management of project information on an AEC project.
However, there are challenges, especially when it comes to the setup of SharePoint and the ongoing management of security across a project’s lifecycle. With what many perceive as a ton of overhead to use and maintain, many companies avoid using the platform, despite the fact they likely already own it, missing out on a huge opportunity to drive ROI.
This podcast episode discusses best practices for setting up SharePoint and maintaining effective security, taxonomy, and libraries; emphasizing the importance of automation in these processes to alleviate the burden on IT departments and end-users. By automating user provisioning, security trimming, and metadata tagging, organizations can leverage SharePoint to its full potential making it a very powerful tool for AEC projects.
What You Will Learn About How To Use SharePoint Better For Construction Projects
- The power of SharePoint as a collaboration tool in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry.
- Explore best practices for organizing SharePoint libraries, implementing metadata, and automating user provisioning and security trimming.
- Understand the complexities of managing permissions at scale and how automation can streamline access control for external collaborators.
- Find out how Project Ready’s automation solutions can simplify SharePoint setup and ongoing management, enabling effective collaboration and document management in the AEC industry.
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 Microsoft Teams, M365 as an overview and Email management with Outlook.
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Transcript
Joe Giegerich:
Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming to today’s podcast. It’s part of a continuing series that we’re doing. We recently did one about M365 and the AEC. And as part of that webcast, we had said we were going to break out into some of the core components of M365 and its utility for the AEC.
Also, just to note, we do have upcoming webcasts consistent with what I just said around Teams, Power Automate and the like and how the AEC can take benefit of that. Another webcast that we have that we’re particularly excited about is entitled AI: Garbage In, Garbage Out. In that webcast, we’re going to look at what does it really mean practically as it relates to AI? What does your data need to look like? How do you make this really work for the AEC? It’s a hot buzz term, that and data-driven decisions, but we have the benefit of being joined by Jeff Walter and Salla Eckhardt and getting their insight as well.
Anyway, for today we’re going to focus on SharePoint specifically. It is a product that’s been around for a very, very long time now. 2003 was its first release with that name. We watched that evolve, the services practice that this company came from were specialists in collaboration and workflow and SharePoint was core to our practice. No surprise, we’ve ended up with the product we have today in ProjectReady.
Joining me is Shaili Modi Oza, the head of development here at Project Ready. With that, let’s go a bit into what SharePoint is good at. Shaili, let me ask you, what are some of the things that you really think just generally are good for the AEC as it relates to SharePoint itself?
Shaili Modi-Oza:
Yeah, definitely. Hey, Joe. SharePoint is good at a lot of things, but I would say at the highest, it’s one of the best collaboration tools that we have out there. We use it to store files and documents, and it’s a great collaboration tool for all the team members within the project to basically work on documents together. Specifically for documents, all the different features that SharePoint has, including versioning, metadata, maintaining the security, and how it’s integrated with the rest of M365 stack, basically brings it all very well together and it makes it a good document management system for sure.
Joe:
Yeah, I always thought it was the best of the type. I mean, if you compare it to things like Box and the like, which is not a bad product, the permissions on Box, which is something we’ll get to, is a bit challenging. Another thing I really like about SharePoint too and Microsoft in general is that if you have to collaborate with external parties, they don’t need to be registered. How should I put this? They don’t need to be licensed users of the product. You can share liberally with external people. That has great facility, but that has some great challenges as well.
Just to pick up on the integration with M365, I’ll just do basically a litany list here, but Teams itself. Now, Teams, when it came out, everybody goes, well, where is SharePoint? SharePoint is actually that document library that you see in Teams. So, let me stop there. You get that document library in SharePoint. What’s the up and downside of that? And are you really using the full extent of SharePoint if that’s all you’re using? A bit of a loaded question.
Shaili:
Yeah, yeah, I understand. But essentially I think what you said is when we use the M365 Teams team, any documents or any data that is stored in the backend, there’s a SharePoint site behind it essentially. If the users just stay in Teams, it is hidden because they don’t directly go to SharePoint, but it just comes with this default documents library, which is very wide open. Anybody who has access to the Teams would basically have access to the entire library with all the documents within it.
This essentially just makes it very hard to manage because we don’t want all the internal/external guest users to have access to all the documents. Just using that is definitely not enough to make sure that all the data is properly organized and security trimmed. Essentially, it’s just one big massive document library which is not secured.
Joe:
It’s not governable. That documents library is, to your point, basically ungoverned and not governable. There’s nothing you can really do because it’s getting those permissions from that Teams channel and group, that Teams team. Correct?
Shaili:
Yes, yes. Yeah, that’s correct.
Joe:
Now, to Microsoft’s credit, Teams is, I’ve said this often, is basically a wrap around its stack in large measure. I mean you have Outlook or Exchange behind it. You have Teams which consumes what was formally Skype, but they’re wise enough to give you that document library, why walk away from something that has been working for everybody for such a long time? And I think it’s really incumbent upon IT or technology to make better use of that SharePoint that exists behind that. And we’ll get to that as to what we do to manage that in a bit.
And I was going to rattle off a list. I will do that now. So the integration with the rest of M365. There’s Teams, there’s the Power Platform, very powerful and constantly getting better and it’s really quite amazing. And then in particular, things that people forget about if they’re using SharePoint on any level, is that with your E3 or E5 or E6 or whatever it is that you procured, you get access to Record Center and E-Discovery.
So in an industry that does often have to deal with litigation and contesting various things, the ability to have E-Discovery is hugely powerful. And Record Center, for those of you who are not familiar with it, allows you based upon how long you want to document, the type of document, to put it someplace else out of that main collection and eventually delete it. And so when it comes to any sort of litigation, they’ll go after every document you have and you talk to customers, “Oh, we have every document that we ever created in 20 or 30 years.” That’s probably not a good idea to be honest with you. And but the challenge is how do you keep track of all that stuff? We’ll bring it back to SharePoint where you have versioning, where you have rich metadata, you have the ability for Record Center to chew on something, to manage that content over its lifecycle and then eventually obsolesce it and remove it from your enterprise.
So moving on to what’s good about SharePoint as well, and this will be a bit of a pivot. The other thing about SharePoint and that I always thought worked well for the AEC when we started doing this as custom work a decade ago, it’s a great place to store as-built and to close out a project. So if you’re using or involved in a project that has Procore, an Autodesk product, et cetera and so forth, and you need a final resting place for all this information, SharePoint is just perfectly a great place to put that stuff. However, there’s two caveats that should be mentioned. One is that yes, you can put a Revit file in there, but you can’t edit it. You can open it, you can look at it, but if you try to save a change, it won’t work. So that’s one of the challenges with SharePoint. But again, if it’s for an as-built or for a closeout, I don’t think they’re the biggest deal. It’s a great place to house it.
The other thing as we mentioned is people are pretty familiar. If they’re familiar with SharePoint, they’re familiar with the share with function, but security and trimming that security has, there’s great capacity within the product, but there are some specific challenges. So Shaili, if you would walk us through those challenges.
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely. And with the security in SharePoint, definitely the great feature about this is that it has a lot of different options in terms of security and what the users are able to configure that you can share different libraries to different users with different permissions, which makes it very powerful, but makes it very hard to set up.
And if you look at it at the organization level where there are so many projects going on and so many SharePoint sites to manage each with so many different libraries and managing that level of permissions at the library level for different users becomes a very difficult and challenging task with permissions. And specific, you can have users who can read just the documents or the different levels that SharePoint has essentially make it very powerful where you can have users who can read, edit, contribute, edit, but not delete or just full control to everything, which makes it really great to make sure that the users can do exactly what they should be accessing and updating on libraries. But setting that up across sites and libraries, it’s a very tedious and a manual task, which would take a very long time to set up properly. And it would still be error-prone, I would believe if somebody’s doing it manually, adding/removing users and setting up all of these permissions would would be quite challenging.
Joe:
It’s as powerful as how quickly did the help desk took to go in and how quickly did IT respond? And things happen, right? And people don’t get it right all the time.
Shaili:
Yes.
Joe:
One other thing to pick up on too as well is that people are familiar… I should have led with this to a certain extent, people are look at SharePoint as an intranet, which clearly it’s heavily used for. The thing that we had started encountering a long time back was the desire to use SharePoint for projects within the AEC. And it’s on that project level, that security and that security trimming and permissions really becomes difficult at scale. And I think it’s one of the large reasons why people, we’ll go in and you’ll see a one site that has a hundred projects represented by a hundred folders or a hundred libraries, and at that point you cannot really maintain security. Fair enough, Shaili?
Shaili:
Yeah. And I think that you made a great point there, Joe, because it’s really important how you set SharePoint up to make sure that you effectively use it. And we’ve seen that with so many companies where just as you said, they just set up a big one SharePoint site called Projects, and then everything is under it
Joe:
It’s a file system dump.
Shaili:
Yeah, exactly. Folders and sub folders because that’s what users are used to. But that doesn’t give the users all the different benefits that we would get by separating it out and having that taxonomy and libraries properly set up and security trimmed would just make it that much more powerful.
Joe:
And again, it’s one of the reasons why people tend not to use SharePoint effectively on a project to project basis, right? Because in addition to the security and the like, is making sure that the right SharePoint taxonomy, the site, the libraries themselves all are consistent as well. On this level, this is one of the reasons why SharePoint is not used effectively or as broadly as it could be as it relates to managing projects and project content.
So question for you, at scale, what are the advantages of having one SharePoint site for one project? What is the advantage to the institution and the user, that one-to-one relationship?
Shaili:
Yeah, I mean there are a lot of advantages with that. I would start with definitely the way M365 is now designed and how everything comes together, what we talked about previously with Teams and Power Platform and then the Outlook Mailbox for emails, all of that is connected to a single M365 group, which comes with a SharePoint site behind it. So the way M365 has now designed everything to come together, it all comes together with the M365 group that is behind it.
And the main benefit of separating each project to have its own SharePoint site along with the M365 group, is that it can be managed separately. There are team members who are going to be different across different projects. You can add/remove team members who would have access to all the different M365 assets, but then it would make that separation that much cleaner and it would make it possible for all the different project sites to have that same taxonomy, the same library set up, the different metadata properties while the team members would essentially be able to be added and removed much more effectively.
Joe:
Yeah, that’s a point that when you’re getting SharePoint now, it like started with Teams will give you that document library, you get an M365 group, and that group is a whole kit and caboodle of tooling. And what you see is people still tend to look at the Microsoft Suite as one-offs that we should develop this, that or the other thing. There’s not as a strong an eye in our observation that they’re yearly using this effectively. And going back to the one project for one SharePoint site, it’s really one project for one M365 group. And so that’s the clarification that I was remiss in. And with that you get, for instance, the group mailbox. Separate topic, but the group mailbox functions like a public folder used to in Outlook.
All right. So let’s just move ahead as to then. So what are some of the best practices when you’re looking to set up or fully develop SharePoint when you’re using it within the enterprise?
Shaili:
Yeah, I would definitely start with the one thing we are already discussing about of making sure that the SharePoint sites are organized in a way that make the most sense in terms of each project having its own site. And once that is defined, I think the next most important thing is defining the taxonomy that makes sense for the organization.
So for a SharePoint site, like we discussed earlier when we are talking that it comes with just a single default document library. So it makes sense to just think through and decide what are the different libraries for projects that would make sense to organize all the different documents and assets for the project, and not just the libraries, but then the different metadata that goes with it and all the different team members and what access they would need. So just getting that whole set up in place I think is very important to make sure that the SharePoint setup becomes that much more effective.
Joe:
And two things on that. One is that the other moral of the story is consistency. If every project has a different set of libraries and metadata, it becomes fundamentally impossible to be able to get data matches for forensics later on. Let me look at all contracts of this type. And all that kind of goes away if you don’t have a consistent taxonomy as to what each SharePoint site should look like for that project. And then the other thing about the libraries in the folders, in a way we generally approach it with people who are coming off of file systems or we’re using SharePoint as a glorified file system, is to look at the top root, so you got four shared libraries, the H-drive, the X-drive, whatever it may be, look at that root. That’s probably your library. Drill into the next level. Maybe there’s four more levels, maybe four more libraries. And as you start to go down in terms of these nested folders, nine times out of 10, those nested folders are really just brute force metadata. Do you agree, Shaili?
Shaili:
Yeah, definitely agreed.
Joe:
And plus the canonication of names in the files themselves, that’s metadata. So as you go through that journey and you go, well, look, I want to be able to get control over my information, I want to be able to really get secure access to it. I really want to be able to manage it. Those are the steps as you start to move away from a file system that I just encourage everybody to look at regardless of whether or not they’re going to become a project ready customer or just to use SharePoint in general.
Shaili:
Yeah, great. And the great thing about metadata in SharePoint is that unlike other systems that we are familiar with, it’s very customizable. And sometimes it’s just as simple as setting up default values depending on where the files are being dropped. And just by dropping the file in that library is going to tag it with all of those properties.
Joe:
Yeah, de facto.
Shaili:
Yeah. Which makes it very simple for the end user to not worry about setting things up, yet it tags everything correctly. There can be power automate flows around it, and it would be very powerful definitely for searching the content. If you’re searching everything that is of a particular discipline or a particular type across your entire SharePoint, if the documents are tagged properly, it just makes it that much more powerful.
Joe:
And that’s something that we also recommend to clients is that, you know, can have more than one content type within a library, but if you can do it, if it scales, having a one-to-one relationship there of a library is a default content type in and of itself. That drives what you were just mentioning.
Shaili:
Yeah, exactly. Because as we’ve noticed so many times for users who are coming off of directory file folders and drives, it’s just if we throw too much at them to select too many things, people won’t do that. So it’s just to simplify it, I think it’s best to have that one-to-one where users would be able to just drop content easily and start using SharePoint.
Joe:
Yeah, I mean, as a general rule, you don’t want to ask an end user to do anything unless it adds value to their day. And while arguably it takes some, takes a while to write a 256 character paragraph as a file name, the more you put in the way of the end user, rightfully, the more they will gripe. And so again, if you can simplify it, make one library, one content type, they just drop it there. Because we used to encourage our clients, again off of our other company, well just put in mandatory metadata and nobody, so everybody would just go over to box, you know what I mean? It was just like, or they would email stuff and they would just do an N-run around it. So, as it relates to SharePoint M365, group one to the project, so we discussed what’s really good about the SharePoint setup now is that you can have discrete libraries, allows you to make sense of content, you can leverage Record Center and other tooling.
And then the big thing is the ability to set that unique permissions on each library means you have a better way to securely share information. And people do use that share with function. Some institutions make sure you can’t send it outside of your institution to share-with, which is not the worst idea depending. But the share-with thing is kind of like that documents library, to my mind, it’s a bit of a wild west. So if you can get a match of a roll to a library, well then you can really start to security trim based upon an end users function within that collaborative process. But Shaili, so what’s the challenge though, around maintaining that security?
Shaili:
Yeah, exactly. And like you mentioned, while the share-with is great, it complicates things a lot because if once users have access to start sharing files, it messes up a lot of SharePoint permissioning where it just shares the files with the people who have been added in the share-with. So I think it’s definitely not recommended to just use that all over the place for sure.
But I would think that in terms of mapping the role to what access the user would have, I think where that makes a lot of sense, if you take an example that let’s say an architect is supposed to have contribute access to the Designs library, whereas another external consultant is just supposed to have read only access to the library, they’re all added as members to the SharePoint site, but then specifically at the document library level, they need different access. So this is where a matrix would make the most sense, where once a person is added as a team member, based on what your role is, you are supposed to be accessing a library with a specific permission. So you would have a matrix where anybody who gets added as an architect would have contribute access to this library. Anybody who gets added as an external consultant gets read access to this library. It’s kind of a matrix. I think that that makes the most sense.
Joe:
But the challenge is on an AEC project, you’re going to have one and 20 other vendors and it goes on for a long time. Even on a short spin of a project, you’re constantly having to adjust permissions at that point. Right?
Shaili:
Definitely.
Joe:
So that’s the challenge at scale. And obviously, well, not obviously, but that’s one of the things that we address, is that matrix, is that automation of secure access just by a role, by simply as adding and removing somebody. But that is one of the obstacles to using SharePoint in a more granular fashion on projects, because again, SharePoint’s widely used for an intranet. And in large measure, the intranet itself is set and forget. You have a particular group of users who are in HR and you’re kind of good, there’s not a lot of ongoing maintenance. But within an AEC project, it’s very dynamic, right?
Shaili:
People come in and out of projects, and as there are multiple SharePoint sites, the different libraries, just constantly managing those permissions is extremely difficult and it’s a lot of overhead to make sure that that’s set up correctly because there-
Joe:
It’s still coming.
How does one set up an external user to participate in an M365 group?
Shaili:
So for external users, it is very manual right now. And essentially someone from IT who has access to the company’s Azure Active Directory would have to invite a user. So Azure Active Directory is essentially the backend system where all the users of the M365 stack would be. You can access them, you can invite users. Essentially everything happens from Azure Active Directory. So somebody from IT essentially would have to do that, where you invite someone, they get this registration email, they would register in the system, and even after they’re registered, they would then have to go back and make sure they have the correct roles, add them to the correct sites in SharePoint, and just complete that and
Joe:
And correct permissions?
Shaili:
And correct permissions. Yeah,
Joe:
Because it’s just a username, it’s not a role that comes rolling in, I’d say, saying roll twice. But that that’s exactly it. So now I have a user, so I send them an email, I register them, and before we automated that function in one of the earlier versions of our product, it was like a day or two before you could get somebody in this system just based upon the practicality of correspondence by email and manual intervention. Isn’t that what we used to, right? That’s how it used to work. It just sent an email and it was like two days.
And so we’ve pointed out some of the good and great things, the ability to at least house any file type, it’s integration with the rest of the stack, and really what the advantages of beefing up that SharePoint site behind Teams can bring in terms of making sense of a project’s assets, it’s secure access ongoing across a project. And so with that, I just want to segue into, obviously we are a company and talk a little bit about how Project Ready solves some of the challenges we see so that our customers can take advantage of SharePoint more effectively. So if you would Shaili.
Shaili:
Definitely. I think I would start with one of the most basic things of setting up these M365 groups and SharePoint sites and Teams and everything that we’ve been talking about. Having that process in place where whenever there’s a new project we can set all of these up is I think the first and important step are that as Project Ready, we have this simple, basically a wizard, that an end user can walk through when they’re requesting for a new project. And just by making these choices, all the different things that we have been talking about, including the taxonomy, which includes the lists and libraries and metadata, making sure all the team members with the correct roles get added. And all of those assets are security trimmed. So at a high level, setting it up and making sure it’s properly security trimmed, I think is the first and most important thing for the SharePoint site to be set up.
Joe:
And it’s really well received by our clients as well. So if you can automate the invite to Azure AD, right? And it could be a Gmail account, it doesn’t really matter, which we do. And then we have a Roles Matrix which says, this person has this role, here’s what it means in terms of rights in a library, and then click a button and roll out the same standard every time is what we bring to the party. Because I was always an ardent supporter of SharePoint, I love SharePoint. And at the beginning, I mean we obviously are close partners with Procore and Autodesk, but we started out trying to solve those problems in SharePoint for our customers. So this was based upon all our real world experience, working with some pretty large companies that were all looking to try to achieve the same thing. And that was a big part of the genesis of the company was how can you make SharePoint?
Because at the time there was no M365 and it was all on Prem, work for the AEC. And that’s, that’s in large measure where we started from and continue to refine. I mean the security component, we have one client, they run 2,500, 3000 projects at any one point in time, they tend to be short duration projects, but they’ll update security three to 6,000 times a week because they’re rapid fire. A lot of store build downs in and out, and they have across these 3000 projects, if they’re moving one person times 3000, that’s 3000 security updates just there. And it’s because of that, that a number of our clients… And actually Shaili, if you would, talk about in context with some of our clients, what we’ve solved for in SharePoint that they’re taking advantage of.
Shaili:
Yeah, I think definitely what you mentioned, Joe, in terms of security, I think that is one of the biggest pieces, and including the provisioning.
Joe:
It’s our killer app in large measure.
Shaili:
Including the provisioning as well. Because setting up these 2,500 projects with that consistent taxonomy and then ongoing managing the security definitely makes that whole piece, which is setting up SharePoint and security trimming it makes that whole recurring process essentially easy to set up and makes that automated. But on top of it, the whole taxonomy piece as well is very useful. Where we have a customer who uses 30 different documents library, if you had to manually set that up every time you put up a new SharePoint site, again, that’s a lot of work and it’s error-prone. So by making all of that automated, it just gives that ease of use for our customers. So I think just setting up all of that correctly, because a lot of times end users are not really sure what are the best practices and how to set all of this up. So by automating it for end users, it just makes it that much easier for them to adopt and start using SharePoint.
Joe:
Yeah, if you can’t solve those problems, you can’t really use SharePoint effectively. It’s got all the stuff you want in it, right? Best of breed, best in class, but if you have to do what we’re describing at scale, it does fall apart. And it’s this automation and this security that we think really allows our customers to use SharePoint at scale in a fashion that otherwise just wasn’t even a choice for them in truth. All right, Shaili, anything else you would like to add or any closing comments?
Shaili:
No, I think we can go on about SharePoint for hours for sure, because we are so close to it. But yeah, I think definitely all the things we talked about makes SharePoint. Because of all of these great features, many of our customers find it intimidating, too. They don’t really know where to start and how to set it up. And that’s where just with all the different tools and features that we provide, I think it just gives that a good help to any organization essentially to start adopting and using SharePoint.
Joe:
Yeah, I had one friend in the enterprise group at Microsoft who I showed this to recently, and it was just flattering, I’ll take it. He goes, “Every large enterprise of any kind really needs this capability that we bring to the marketplace.” All right, so I’ll stop plugging us for at least half a heartbeat here. But we hope this was somewhat informative. I mean, SharePoint is near and dear to us. Getting that piece alone, correct. Really. I mean, you already own it, right? So that’s a big part of that value proposition. And one more time with feeling upcoming webcast. We’ll look at Teams, we’ll look at group mailbox. And then the one that, again, I’m just super excited for, which is AI: Garbage In Garbage Out, and how to practically approach AI within the industry. So with that, I’m Joe Giegerich, Shaili Modi Oza, and talk to you next time.