Construction Viz

Project Management Perfect

Microsoft Teams

Manage your projects in Outlook! No, really!

Project Management Tools |

Embracing new technology is often a challenge in construction. While technology can help organizations be more efficient, it is challenging to keep up with the constant changes and new systems required to do the job. To add to this dilemma, every contractor, construction manager, and owner have their own Project Management Information System (PMIS) that team members must learn to conduct business. As a result, actual construction productivity takes a hit due to additional training, double-entry, errors, and general user dissatisfaction. It's no wonder most construction organizations are hesitant to leave old faithful: Microsoft Outlook and Office.

So the challenge is, how do we make it as easy as possible for the construction team to do their job and remove the technology burden of learning and working with multiple PMISs? What if you could work in Outlook or Office entirely without ever having to log into another system?

Welcome to Adaptive Cards

With the flexibility of the Microsoft Power Platform and Adaptive Cards, we have removed the users' burden of learning another PMIS by allowing them to work directly in Microsoft Teams or Outlook. By leveraging Power Automate and Adaptive Cards technology, users can now receive actionable task-focused cards. To respond, users open a card to view the content, review a task, or respond with comments. Work entirely from email or Teams—no need to even log into a PMIS.

The Key Benefits of Adaptive Cards

You may be thinking that your PMIS already sends out emails when there are tasks due. How is this different? Adaptive Cards are the future of actionable messages and notifications. They are essentially small interactive applications.

The are many benefits to Adaptive Cards:

• Cards are responsive to any device.
• The card user interface can be simplified and tailored to perform specific tasks. Using the KISS (keep it simple) approach, we can make it easy for users to review content and respond.
• The cards can include logic to prompt questions and responses without logging into the actual PMIS and never leaving the email.
• Cards can read and write data with various systems such as Microsoft 365 or SharePoint, SAP, Oracle, etc.
• Cards can leverage Windows 10 notifications.
• Cards integrate with Microsoft Teams Chat, Timeline, and Outlook.
• Cards can leverage assistants such as Cortana or a web chatbot.
• Dashboards can be delivered using feeds from multiple Adaptive Cards.
• The cards can include security extended from native applications.

Lydon Solutions can build Adaptive Cards for any PMIS using our pre-defined templates. We even integrated Adaptive Cards into the notification system of Construction Viz, our PMIS for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. By meeting the user where they work in Microsoft Office and Outlook email, Adaptive Cards keep users in their natural activity flow without interruption, making for more efficient and happier project teams. A win-win.

Adaptive Card for a Construction Viz Submittal Form email notification

Deploy Adaptive Cards for Your Construction Projects

Find out how we can leverage our existing Adaptive Card templates to simplify your workflows and provide team members access to project data in the applications they use every day. Contact us for a free consultation and see how we can help your organization with its digital transformation to Microsoft 365.

If you need a turnkey PMIS for managing your projects in Microsoft 365, learn more about using Construction Viz for project management.

Your Flows, Your PMIS: Power Automate & Construction Viz

Power Automate |

Power Automate is a Microsoft 365 service that automates time-consuming business tasks and processes. It makes it practical and simple for line-of-business users to build workflows across applications and services. Most PMIS systems on the market have their own proprietary workflow functionality, but what makes Microsoft’s Power Automate unique, is that it is a stand-alone service that can integrate with both Microsoft 365 as well as external applications.

Being that Construction Viz can be deployed into Microsoft 365, we deeply integrated Power Automate into our application so you can build, deploy, and support your flows from within the Construction Viz hub directly inside your Microsoft 365 tenant. With Microsoft’s free, on-premises data gateway, you can also connect Power Automate flows (as well as other Power Platform services) to line-of-business systems behind your corporate firewall. In fact, we have leveraged the Gateway to connect client’s Microsoft 365 environments to our hosted Construction Viz service offering which opens up a wide array of possibilities.

Power Automate

We make it easier than ever to add your own manual triggers and configurable buttons that allow users to link their flows and add it to any app.

So, What Could You do with Power Automate and Construction Viz?

Send out Construction Viz Action Items for review that will update one or more Microsoft 365 applications at one time from a single workflow. This is triggered by using a button you can add to the Action Item form. So not only will the alert notification display as an action item in a user’s ball-in-court, but it can also update:

• Microsoft To Do – as a task
• Outlook – as an email approval request, a task or event
• Planner – as an event
• Teams – as a post
• Excel – as an action item in a Worksheet

Why is this important? Because every company or employee might manage their work in different Microsoft 365 applications. For some users, it’s Excel. For others, it might be Outlook, and so on. With Power Automate, you can configure the workflow around how you work and what applications in Microsoft 365 you use frequently.

Other Power Automate workflows can include:

• Creating PDFs from Construction Viz forms as well as attachments
• Extracting data from Excel to use in Construction Viz apps
• Emailing alerts from Power BI dashboards embedded in Construction Viz

To get you started, we have built a set of Power Automate workflows that work with Construction Viz and can be imported into your Microsoft 365 tenant. Once imported, you can modify as needed to create the solution that works best for your organization.

Get Started with Power Automate

Get the most out of Microsoft 365 by combining Construction Viz with Power Automate to create unparalleled solutions.

To find out more, schedule a free demo of Construction Viz. If you need help with Microsoft 365 setup for your construction organization, check out our managed services at Lydon Solutions.

Collaborate on your Projects with Construction Viz and Microsoft Teams

Collaboration |

Microsoft Teams, the company’s group chat software application, has been gaining in popularity of late. Microsoft continues to add functionality to Teams and is even phasing out Skype for Business in favor of it. As a result, many organizations are beginning to use Teams for collaboration and communication.  

Teams is also fast becoming a leading project management tool thanks to how it combines with Office 365 and SharePoint Online. When you create a new team in the application, Teams automatically generates a linked SharePoint Online site collection. You can access your team’s SharePoint site by clicking on the globe in the top navigation. 

Construction Viz, which is powered by SharePoint, seamlessly integrates into Teams, allowing you to access all your project information from one location. Read on to learn how.  

Connecting Construction Viz with Microsoft Teams 

We provide organizations looking to use Construction Viz and Teams together with several options: 

1.     Teams SharePoint Site

We can deploy Construction Viz into the SharePoint site that Teams created for you. This keeps all your team’s project data in one place and tied to your Office 365 credentials (no need to log into multiple sites/systems).

2.     SharePoint Online Site

As an alternative, we can deploy Construction Viz to another location in your Office 365/ SharePoint Online environment. Then we can add a tab in Teams linking to Construction Viz. As above, your Office 365 credentials will allow access to both Teams and Construction Viz. 

3.     Externally Hosted SharePoint

If you prefer a turnkey and cloud-based solution, Lydon Solutions can provide web hosting and support of Construction Viz. In this case, we add a tab in Teams linking to our hosted instance of Construction Viz.

Microsoft Teams

Learn More About Construction Viz 

Construction Viz is about choice and it is the only construction management platform designed around how you work and where you work. 

Contact us today to find out more about Teams and Construction Viz as well as how we can help you better manage your projects.