Frequently Asked Questions

With VPO, we manage your data in Microsoft’s Cloud solution, Office 365. Learn more about Microsoft Office 365. With Office 365, it is your data. You own it. You control it. Moreover, it is yours to take with you if you decide to leave the service. That is why we have chosen to deliver VPO in Office 365. Microsoft takes every precaution to make sure your environment is secure and compliant.

Visit the Office 365 Trust Center to find detailed and up-to-date information directly from Microsoft.

First, let’s be clear what Office 365 is. It is not just the desktop applications of Microsoft Office like Outlook, Word, and Excel. It is also Microsoft’s managed services for hosted email, file sharing, online meetings, and more. Learn more about Microsoft Office 365.

If your company is using Office 365, we can simply install our VPO application within your company’s Office 365 environment. By using the same environment, it will allow your users to sign-in to VPO using the same credentials that they access their email.

With VPO, we provide a subscription of Office 365 for each end user. If you already subscribe to an Office 365 plan that includes Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Skype, we will discount our monthly fee.

While we do not offer a free trial, we do offer a month-to-month use of VPO, so your investment to try it on a project is controllable. We do not require an annual contract, so if after a month or two you determine VPO is not a good fit for you, you can cancel at any time.

We recommend using VPO on an actual project because your time is valuable. In our experience, we have learned that it takes some investment of your time and training to determine if a project management system is going to work for you.

With VPO, there is no large upfront fees or the need to invest in expensive hardware or software licenses. Therefore, it is easy to try it out on pilot project.

On your first project, we typically deliver VPO within a few days. After notice to proceed, we schedule a kickoff meeting to determine the features and customization needed as well as permissions for the team.

You will have a single point of contact who is responsible for setting up and configuring your project site. We turn over the new project to you to review and deliver training to the project team. The training is role-based training and very focused on how your team will use VPO.

We deliver our training in an online meeting which is recorded and usually takes about an hour. We may deliver multiple training sessions to groups of users like the Owner, Architect, and Contractors. This way, we can teach each group how to use VPO from their aspect. You can watch the training at any time –and it is especially helpful for when you start using VPO for the first time.
first time.

That is fine. Many of our customers request features that are unique to their requirements or their client’s requirements. VPO is easily customizable, and that is the major difference between it and an off-the-shelf application. With VPO, we start by using our proven, best practices content to get up-and-running quickly and then work with you to tailor the system which may include adding new functionality. A system should support your processes, not force you to change your processes to fit the system. That is the approach we use with VPO.

VPO is an application that is installed in the Microsoft Cloud either in your company’s Office 365 environment or an Office 365 environment that we initiate for you. With VPO, you will have access to an online, browser-based experience and a mobile-friendly experience from your mobile device. As the owner of VPO, you can share project information and documentation securely, with people you work with on your projects like Architects, Engineers, and Vendors. We administer VPO for you, leaving you free to manage your projects.

Yes. VPO is a web-based application and works with web browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, as well as Microsoft browsers. We also offer a mobile app with VPO that works on Apple and Android operating systems.

Both and more! Any organization involved with engineering and construction projects can use VPO. We work with Owners who use VPO to manage large, capital programs. We work with General Contractors who use VPO as a management tool to make sure the project gets completed on-time and within budget. Construction Management firms use VPO to coordinate everyone on the team to ensure their client’s success. No matter what your role is, VPO can improve the way you manage projects.

First, let’s be clear what Office 365 is. It is not just the desktop applications of Microsoft Office like Outlook, Word, and Excel. It is also Microsoft’s managed services for hosted email, file sharing, online meetings, and more. Learn more about Microsoft Office 365.

If your company does not have Office 365, that is fine; we provide it as part of VPO. If your company is considering moving to Office 365, you will be one step ahead because we will set up Office 365 when we set up VPO.

Yes. While you can access a web application like VPO on a smartphone or tablet’s browser, it is best to use a mobile app while accessing VPO information from a mobile device. We have VPO Mobile, our mobile app and you can also use Microsoft’s mobile apps for SharePoint, Skype, OneDrive, and Office to interact with information managed in VPO.

It depends on the customer’s requirements and needs. However, here we typically leverage the following apps in our VPO deployments:

SharePoint, OneDrive, Project Online, Project Professional, Skype for Business, Power BI, Office Online, Office Mobile App, Office Pro–which includes the latest versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and more. Some third-party apps are used as needed also.

As new Microsoft apps become available, we will add them to our VPO solution if they enhance our customer’s ability to manage projects more effectively.

No, it is not just the desktop applications of Microsoft Office like Outlook, Word, and Excel. It is also Microsoft’s managed services for hosted email, file sharing, online meetings, and more. Learn more about Microsoft Office 365.

With Office 365, Microsoft provides the servers, software, and monitoring services to making sure that your applications are always accessible. They offer a 99.9% guaranteed uptime which is financially backed.
Office Professional is the desktop version of Office that is offered as a subscription through Office 365, always giving you the latest version of Office including Outlook, Word, Excel and others.

Project Online is a newer offering from Microsoft. It provides Project Portfolio Management capabilities, including what-if analysis, resource management, and visibility across your projects. It works with Microsoft Project Professional, the desktop version of Project, enabling you to work with your tool of choice to create and manage your projects. Alternatively, you can use Project Online in a web browser to edit project information. You can start new projects using templates, and take advantage of central resource planning.

Learn more about Project Online.