Your team collaborates everywhere. In email, chat, and through comments across content. So how do you find what you need and how do you keep all these correspondences in context?
In most cases, you don’t.
In fact, an article from Business reports that 92% of workers collaborate over documents using email, and from there:
- 83% lose time due to versioning issues
- 50% waste time looking for what they need
- And overall, an estimated 21.3% of productivity is lost due to document challenges (Business)
The solution seems simple enough: One search bar should cover all of your content. It should know what you want as you’re trying to source an unsigned contract for a prospective client, even if you’re searching for that PDF, which may live in one of your clouds, from your email.
Easier said than done? Not anymore.
With the latest updates rolling out for Microsoft Search and ProjectReady’s existing integrations and user-friendly functions, your out-of-the-box experience with products like SharePoint and Office 365 are maximized. And with ProjectReady, you can take that efficiency to a whole new level.
Now, you can continue to use Autodesk BIM 360, Box, and Procore but see all your project’s content curated to a single, centralized project site. Where previously, you had to go from window to window, downloading content from different systems to create a document package for a team member’s review, you can now use DCNext’s content cart. With an e-commerce experience to check out and track document packages, you won’t need to go looking in the first place. Additionally, you’ll get to enjoy that same, simple workflow — finding, previewing, packaging, and tracking content — directly from your Outlook and Teams accounts.
Because your content is automatically grouped by the project ID, ProjectReady’s integration in your company cloud means that you’ll know exactly where to go to find what you need. Additionally, you’ll get an even clearer and more streamlined view available in both your Outlook and your Teams. Wherever you’re collaborating, your content is there.
Your search experience also becomes simplified, since ProjectReady cuts through the clutter with a quick Microsoft Search, locating any of the content that’s automatically been saved and kept clean in SharePoint through ProjectReady. And that same project ID tags all your correspondences, whether they’re taking place in email, comments, or chat, and Microsoft Search will pull it up as soon as you go looking, wherever in the Microsoft ecosystem the content was saved.
And it gets better. In the new year (mid-2020) Microsoft will introduce Project Cortex, which will work to deliver clearer and more impactful insights on the content your team works on every day:
Project Cortex uses AI to reason over content across teams and systems, recognizing content types, extracting important information, and automatically organizing content into shared topics like projects, products, processes and customers. Cortex then creates a knowledge network based on relationships among topics, content, and people (Microsoft).
Basically, Microsoft will be going the extra mile. Not only will you understand where your content lives, but the stress of naming conventions and building out folders will be a thing of the past. Your digital workspace will know what you’re working on, where to store it, and how to make it accessible to the right people.
Since ProjectReady was built in the Microsoft cloud, we anticipate a seamless integration with the new AI. After all, our model is to drive process over platform. We work with the systems people need to use to help project team’s create repeatable workflows that drive standardization across the entire enterprise. And until Cortex is officially unveiled, here are a few of the ways ProjectReady has been working towards that goal:
Emails Made Actionable with ProjectReady
- Email Workflow Connector: Having your Outlook connected to your other workplaces means that your email correspondences are connected to the project they’re speaking to. But often, a lack of standardization and consistency makes it tough to know where you need to start your search. ProjectReady and Microsoft Search make it easy to start from the window you’re already working in, even if your content is in another.
- Automated RFIs: A request for information (RFI) is a key day to day correspondence that should be kept in context with the content is referring to. Otherwise, your team will waste their time searching through a backlog of documents you hope are related. But with ProjectReady Outlook connector, submit an RFI without leaving your inbox and stay confident that everything will stay in context.
- Schedule and Task Visibility: ProjectReady’s add on also enables you to have a one pane view of your entire project within one window: Your Outlook email. Microsoft Search and ProjectReady means that any actionable items or outstanding tasks can be pulled up in seconds, and all kept in line with all your related content.
Communication Provisioned with Office 365 and Teams
- Collaboration in Context: ProjectReady provisions a place for your team to collaborate, for each project you’re working on. Microsoft Teams communications are not only kept in line with the project, but additional channels within the project channel are automatically created to keep collaboration in context.
- Outlook in Microsoft Teams: Without having to open multiple apps to communicate with your team, write emails, assign deliverables, set deadlines for document-controlled tasks, and more, all through the Outlook view in Microsoft Teams.
- Drag and Drop to Make Groups: Office 365 Groups plus ProjectReady means that your project team can easily work in groups, streamlined and kept in context with a project ID in Microsoft Teams. ProjectReady takes this organization a step further by keeping this same consistency in Outlook. Just drag and drop your team members together to create a group and keep emails and content together.