Have a seat with Microsoft 365 developer platform

A few weeks back I had the opportunity to collaborate with a few fellow MVP’s and Vesa and Waldek on the Tech Days. The goal of the event was to inspire people what you can achieve with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. By combining the different services, the platform provides you can build cool experiences. In our case we choose to build a solution that would allow you to get back to the office; booking your desk. So during the build phase we all picked different Microsoft 365 services to build the solution with. Using Teams to integrate, Chatbots and Adaptive Card Extensions to quickly book a desk, and finally PowerBI to catch all that information 🚀.

You can watch the full recording online 📺.

PowerBI dashboard

My ‘chore’ was to build a PowerBI dashboard that gathers all the booking and reservation information. The main goal thus is to provide insights. The dashboard itself is straight forward; a single page that gathers and combines a few different sources.

Since all the data is in SharePoint the first step is to gather this data into PowerBI. You can read about this on the Microsoft Docs: Create a report on a SharePoint List in Power BI Desktop. We use several different lists to store bookings, reservations and desk information. To combine those we link these lists together in PowerBI with relations. The best way to do this to use a star schema and link different tables together.

With the schema in place you can start working on the dashboard; however in our case we wanted to have some additional calculations. These calculations can be made as quick measures. A quick sample would be to determine how far in advance people book their event. To achieve this we created a quick measure that compares two dates and use that to provide some more insights.

Days booked in advanced = DATEDIFF('Bookings'[Created],'Bookings'[Booking Date],DAY)

All in all I had a lot of fun preparing the demo and building cool stuff with awesome people 🔥. If you are intrigued you can watch the full recording online 📺 or just reach out for a private viewing ⚡.