Webinar: Running Effective Projects in Office 365 - The Associated Engineering Story

​Many organizations create project site templates to manage their projects in SharePoint, either online or on premises. However, SharePoint is only part of the equation when it comes to collaborating effectively on projects. The new consolidation of Office 365 Groups, SharePoint Team Sites, Planner, and Yammer brings both choice and flexibility, which can present their own challenges.

This session will cover the following:

• Conversational confusion. What is appropriate for different scenarios – Outlook conversations, Yammer threads, Teams persistent chats, or some combination?
• Review of a project site template we've created in Office 365 using SharePoint Online, Office 365 Groups, Planner, and Teams
• Sharing your project site externally – SharePoint external sharing or Azure B2B?
• Customizing the UI to bring in project information from other systems
• Build a site creation workflow process to automate the creation of sites and groups in Office 365, external B2B groups, and configure all the permissions
• Inviting external users into the project site with Extranet User Manager
• How to maintain private internal content and project content shared with the external group
• Single sign-on to other project tools outside of Office 365

Benefits:

• Leverage Office 365 Groups, Team Sites, Planner, and Teams all together
• Provide effective governance around creating and using project sites
• Include people from outside your organization in your collaborative project sites

In this webinar we will demo the work done with Associated Engineering to create a self-serve site request and provisioning process to support the rapid creation of project sites in Office 365. Staff fill out a form specifying the requirements for the project site and who requires what access to it. This includes not only AE staff but external users as well. You will see how site owners can invite both internal and external users through Azure AD B2B to collaborate in the sites, while proper governance is maintained through control of site structure and permissions.

The next phase is in development, where site requests also include the site template to be used. Several templates have been developed by AE, and Envision IT is building automation to create the sites by leveraging Office Dev PnP tools to apply the appropriate site templates.