Never Lose a Project Decision: Communication Management for AEC Firms

Critical project decisions in architecture, engineering, and construction happen across scattered email inboxes and Microsoft Teams channels. RFIs get buried in reply chains, change orders are clarified in ephemeral chats, and client approvals disappear when team members leave or channels get deleted. Newforma Konekt solves this with comprehensive communications management that automatically captures, organizes, and preserves both email and instant messaging conversations, creating a complete, searchable project record that protects your firm and ensures nothing critical gets lost.

Email remains the backbone of formal project correspondence in AEC. Contracts, RFIs, submittals, change orders, and client approvals flow through inboxes every day. Newforma Konekt provides centralized project email management that ensures every critical message is filed, searchable, and accessible to your entire project team. When an email arrives related to a project, it can be filed directly to the correct project in Newforma Konekt, creating a single view of truth for all project correspondence. No more lost approvals buried in personal folders. No more asking “Did anyone see that email from the client?” The project email record becomes complete, structured, and defensible.

Emails can be quickly associated with specific RFIs, submittals, issues, and other project records, ensuring that correspondence is properly linked to the work it relates to. This creates traceability across the entire project lifecycle. When you’re reviewing an RFI months later, you can instantly see every email conversation that happened around it. When team members transition off the project, the complete email record remains accessible, ensuring continuity and protecting institutional knowledge. Every project message is stored in one secure location, providing full visibility into project communications and eliminating the risk of critical emails being lost or overlooked.

The Newforma Konekt Outlook Add-In brings project email management directly into the inbox where your team already works. Instead of forcing users to switch between tools or manually copy information into a separate system, the add-in enables seamless filing of emails to the appropriate projects without leaving Outlook. As emails arrive, users can file them to projects with just a few clicks, send and file simultaneously, or save entire email threads to maintain full conversation context. This seamless integration dramatically improves user adoption. Teams don’t have to change their workflows or learn new tools. They continue working in Outlook exactly as before, while project-critical communication is automatically captured in real-time.

The add-in also provides in-Outlook access to previously filed project emails, letting users reference past correspondence without switching to another application. Smart project suggestions accelerate filing by intelligently recommending the correct project based on email content and sender. Users can configure filing preferences to match their workflow, and emails can be tagged by type (RFI, submittal, action item) to ensure consistent structure across the project record. By eliminating friction and embedding project email management directly into the tools teams already use daily, the Outlook Add-In turns email filing from a chore into a natural part of the project workflow.

Finding the right information at the right time can make or break a project deadline. Newforma Konekt’s deep search capabilities let you search across email content, attachments, and metadata to locate exact information within seconds. Whether you’re looking for a specific clause in a PDF contract attached to an email six months ago, tracking down technical specifications buried in a Word document, or finding a client approval hidden in a reply chain, powerful search goes beyond subject lines and message bodies to retrieve project-critical data from everywhere it lives, including inside attachments.

This eliminates time wasted combing through inboxes, asking teammates to forward old messages, or trying to remember who sent what when. Deep search retrieves buried threads, attached documents, and metadata instantly, giving your team immediate access to the information they need to make decisions and move work forward. When every minute counts and you need to reference a detail from months ago, deep search ensures you find it in seconds instead of hours.

Microsoft Teams has become the default platform for fast-moving project coordination, but critical decisions, clarifications, and issue resolutions that happen in Teams channels often remain trapped outside the formal project record. When channels are deleted, teams are disbanded, or message retention policies expire, those conversations disappear, taking important project context with them. The Newforma Microsoft Teams Connector solves this by automatically archiving public and shared Teams channel conversations directly within your Newforma Konekt project record. Messages, replies, reactions, and file attachments are captured in real time as they happen, and historical channel content is retrieved when a channel is first linked, giving your project record immediate visibility into past conversations.

What makes the Teams Connector particularly valuable is its ability to preserve communication history beyond what Microsoft Teams alone provides. Once a channel is linked, when a Teams message is edited, Newforma Konekt preserves both the current version and prior versions with timestamps. When a message is deleted in Teams, the deleted message remains in the Newforma Konekt record, clearly marked as deleted. This creates a complete audit trail that reflects the message’s full lifecycle, not just its current state. This is critical for compliance, contractual requirements, project closeout, and dispute resolution. The integration is read-only and requires no changes to how teams work. Project administrators link specific channels to projects, and teams continue collaborating in Teams exactly as before, while their conversations are automatically preserved for the long term.

Shive-Hattery, a leading architecture and engineering firm, leveraged Newforma’s issue tracking and email management capabilities to mitigate project risks and improve team efficiency. By ensuring all critical communication is securely filed and easily searchable, their teams avoided project delays and enhanced collaboration.

Benefits Shive-Hattery Experienced:

• Improved Risk Management – Reduced exposure to costly disputes by maintaining a full email record.

• Increased Efficiency – Saved valuable time by quickly locating project communications.

• Better Collaboration – Ensured all team members had access to the latest project information.

• Seamless Issue Tracking – Linked emails directly to project issues for better follow-ups and resolution.

• Project Continuity – Maintained complete documentation, even as team members transitioned.

Read the full testimonial here. 

Email management is a cornerstone of successful project delivery. Our Guide to Mastering Emails and Other Project Communications offers insights into best practices for organizing, filing, and retrieving project correspondence. With Newforma Konekt, teams can implement these strategies effortlessly, ensuring better efficiency and reduced risks.
What You’ll Learn in the Guide:

• Best Practices for Email Organization – How to structure and manage project emails effectively.

• How to Improve Team Collaboration – Tips on streamlining communication across project stakeholders.

• Risk Mitigation Strategies – Learn how to avoid disputes by maintaining a comprehensive email record.

• Efficiency Hacks for AEC Professionals – Reduce time spent searching for critical project information.

• How to Automate Email Filing – Implement strategies to keep project emails categorized without manual effort.

Download the full guide here.