No matter who you are, if you don’t stay on top of your calendar, it can take on a life of its own. It’s very easy to lose control of how many events and meetings we have each day, week, or month. We all want to make sure we’re using our time wisely and that it aligns with broader goals and deliverables.

Using the Microsoft Power Platform combined with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft executives, directors, and teams now have more visibility into how they spend their time. They can do this thanks to a new internally built solution that uses the Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Outlook to analyze their calendar data.

Gaining insight into executives’ calendars

Microsoft executives are under considerable pressure to rationalize their calendars, to learn where they focus their time, with whom they want to focus their time with, and then use that data to prioritize their time. They want answers to questions such as “How much time am I spending talking to HR?”, “How many one-on-ones am I taking?”, “How much time am I spending talking to customers and partners?”, and “Am I going to meet my objectives and key results?”

We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time. We used our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.

—Claire Sisson, principal PM, Productivity Studio

To overcome this challenge, executive assistants and chiefs of staff for Microsoft’s top executives were tasked with finding a way to drill down into the data to see how these senior leaders were spending their time. They extrapolated calendar data and added events, and then created categories to make sense of the data in Microsoft Excel.

Then, they turned to the Productivity Studio team in Microsoft Digital Employee Experiences.

“We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time,” says Claire Sisson, a principal PM who leads the Productivity Studio team. “We used our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.”

Leveraging the Microsoft Power Platform

Microsoft’s Productivity Studio team helps business groups across the company enable product stacks using Microsoft 365 products. For this project, the team was tasked with creating an automated way to capture calendar data, store it, and analyze it so executives could quickly see how they were spending their time.

It settled on a low-code/no-code solution based on the Microsoft Power Platform that leverages Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI. A Power App connects the solution to Microsoft Outlook and enables you to configure your calendar so you can determine what events you want to include or exclude. Power Automate captures the data from the calendar and brings it into the database (Dataverse). Power BI is used on top of Dataverse in a Power App dashboard to get insights on the imported data.

Because Microsoft Power Apps are low code/no code, any IT admin or citizen developer can edit the solution based on their needs. The platform also enables them to build a solution themselves fast using repeatable parts. So, the solution is easily extendable for easier customization.

“You can use Power Apps to digitize and automate processes much faster than you can with traditional custom software,” says Evan Lew, a group product manager for Microsoft Power Apps. “And low code means you can more easily make adjustments and tailor the solution to the users’ needs.”

When it came to building a solution that would help the company’s executives wrangle their time, one of the Productivity Studio’s most significant challenges was to reduce the number of steps and button clicks during installation. It took more than 30 steps to install and onboard an early version of the solution. The team turned to Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power BI to solve this.

The solution they built is available to Microsoft 365 customers via Microsoft AppSource. External customers can get the Microsoft Power Apps package here and the Microsoft Power BI package here. AppSource offers various applications and solutions that work with Windows365 products, allowing users to enable innovation, drive business outcomes, and help them get more done with the tools they already have.

The solution is the most beneficial for people with several different categories of meetings or events they need to analyze.

—Joe Martin, senior product manager, Productivity Studio

“We think this solution will help a lot of executives and other leaders get more out of their most limited resource—their time,” says Naveen Kumar Jangir, the lead Microsoft 365 architect from Microsoft partner Avanade who helped build the solution.

More control over your calendar

With this solution, Microsoft executives can use the data for strategic decision-making regarding how they spend their time. They can now more effectively impact the organization and focus on areas that are more impactful to overall team and organization goals.

“The solution is the most beneficial for people with several different categories of meetings or events they need to analyze,” says Joe Martin, a senior product manager for Productivity Studio.

Currently, the solution has been deployed for a handful of teams for various Microsoft executives, with the goal for it to be deployed to senior leaders across every group. Executives are already using it to see a breakdown of their events, including time spent talking with various departments, the number of one-on-one meetings that they’re holding, time spent talking to customers and partners, and time spent at conferences.

This project also allowed the Productivity Studio team to combine Microsoft products in new and innovative ways that empower executives and others who need to improve how they manage their calendars. It can take learnings and data about how the products function and give it to the product team, improve it, and empower more people. Productivity Studio provides an opportunity to centralize innovation and give back to the products through feedback, product gaps, and new solutions.

“We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time,” says Sisson. “We used elements of our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.”

• Reuse versus reinvent: Consider if you can use tools you already have to transform your internal business processes.
• Stay curious: See how you can leverage your current stack to empower your users the most.
• Listen to your users: Continually get feedback from your users to see what scenarios you can help improve or optimize.
• Use product limitations to innovate: Create solutions to fill in the gaps that your product might have to build a more robust product.

• Find out more on how Microsoft is reinventing its Employee Experience for a Hybrid World.
• Learn how Microsoft uses OKRs to achieve business goals.
• Check out how Microsoft deploys and manages Microsoft 365 within the company.

The post Transforming how Microsoft executives use their time with Microsoft Outlook calendar analytics appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Employees booking rooms and dozens of other similar activities in Microsoft buildings generate significant Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data. All these spatial data readings must be processed in near real-time so that the information remains relevant and significant. If you are looking or searching for a meeting room and cannot figure out whether it is occupied or not within seconds, not only will you walk out the door but also waste your time looking for other rooms, losing productivity. And if the IoT motion sensor data isn’t processed as fast as the employee is entering or leaving the room, you are left with incorrect and outdated information. That lag in information retrieval—even just a few milliseconds—can significantly degrade an employee’s experience.

The way to power employee experiences is to understand the data behind occupancy, room temperatures, hot desking, and more. The question then becomes, ‘How do you power all these employee experiences that are a part of your workplace?’

—Apoorv Gupta, senior software engineer, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Sensors in Microsoft buildings take more than two million IoT readings per day, with an expected traffic growth of around 30 million readings per day.

“The way to power employee experiences is to understand the data behind occupancy, room temperatures, hot desking, and more,” says Apoorv Gupta, a senior software engineer for Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, the team building a new load testing service for the Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) team that manages the company’s buildings. “The question then becomes, ‘How do you power all of these employee experiences that are a part of your workplace?’”

Microsoft’s solution for tracking all these sensor readings was to deploy a Digital Integration Platform that brings all those people, places, and devices together in new and better ways. This solution can simultaneously process data from multiple employee experiences in over 300 buildings across the globe—without compromising system stability, reliability, and load performance. Microsoft Azure Digital Twins powers the Digital Integration Platform on the backend, storing all the sensor data and using it for processing. To load test the solution the team decided to build a full-blown load testing solution leveraging open-source technologies.

I challenged the team to prove that our Digital Integration Platform can scale to integrate with a host of new sensor types, and scale to enable real-time IoT-powered experiences for our global workforce. The MS Digital team met the challenge, leveraging configurable cloud automation to validate the platform at scale, for a remarkably low cost.

—Emmanuel Daniel, director of Digital Transformation and Smart Buildings, Global Workplace Services

“Azure Digital Twins makes it easy to merge the physical and digital worlds by allowing us to map data to device to building,” says Emmanuel Daniel, director of Digital Transformation and Smart Buildings for GWS. “This enables our employees to have great experiences in the physical space.”

According to Daniel, employee experiences are dependent on multiple data points, from many sensors producing a large volume of messages. And for the experiences to successfully work, the platform needs to scale. For example, the size and scale of Microsoft’s Puget Sound-area East Campus makes it very difficult to mirror the environment.

“I challenged the team to prove that our Digital Integration Platform can scale to integrate with a host of new sensor types, and scale to enable real-time IoT-powered experiences for our global workforce,” Daniel says. “The Microsoft Digital team met the challenge, leveraging configurable cloud automation to validate the platform at scale, for a remarkably low cost.”

[Check out inside Microsoft’s smart building in Herzliya, Israel. Read more about accelerating Microsoft’s global real estate transformation with Microsoft Digital. Discover how Microsoft operations evolve with Azure. Look into building Microsoft’s employee-centric experience.]

Leveraging open-source technology for faster deployment

To start the testing process, the team gathered three months of baseline load data from GWS’ previous tool and used that as a benchmark. Then the team created tests that measured how well the system could handle the number of readings/requests per second (RPS) received and overall load distribution. For example, if you have a continuous stream of sensor readings being ingested across hundreds of buildings all at the same time on a global scale, that is a massive load of requests that need to be processed in near real-time between all the types of IoT data that is being processed.

The team ran a complete cycle of load tests, including X load (peak load), twice the peak (2X), and a long-haul endurance run that tracked performance over 24-48 hours. These tests are crucial to ensure that the components as well as the entire system can function at that high-intensity level. They also prepare the system to handle higher loads as additional employee use cases continue to be added.

Once you test the system, you need to determine whether it behaves how you want it to, and how it behaves under load. You need to generate the load and simulate it to mimic the real-life scenario.

—Mridul Verma, senior software engineer, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

“We already knew our solution was going to need to support millions of readings in the future, so we needed to be ready for that by making sure it’s stable under that load,” says Shuvajyoti Deb, a software engineer for the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team. “We helped create the methodology and implementation plan that we used to deploy the load testing solution.”

The team opted to use Apache JMeter and Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters to run the load testing solution. The load testing solution mimics the people, places, devices, sensor types and their locations in all the buildings so the team can see how the Digital Integration Platform would operate in real life.

“Once you test the system, you need to determine whether it behaves how you want it to, and how it behaves under load. You need to generate the load and simulate it to mimic the real-life scenario,” says Mridul Verma, a senior software engineer on the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team who helped set load testing benchmarks and identified bottlenecks.

Throughout the course of testing, the team focused on various metrics related to reliability, performance, and availability to ensure that the solution met the benchmarks and expectations that were set at the beginning of the project. Upon completing each round of testing, the team ran an analysis and determined where it could alter the instances or configurations to better optimize the system. Once the alterations were made the team ran the same set of tests again to see if performance improved and continued to optimize until it met expectations. ­­

The last stage of the project was creating automated pipelines and making them available on GitHub so anyone in GWS can perform load testing. The availability of the solution on GitHub makes it a lot easier and faster for teams to conduct the load testing for their respective services and platforms. Additionally, the availability of the load testing solution on GitHub makes it open to customization as required.

“GitHub makes it easy for users to access the load testing solution quickly contribute to it to meet their needs,” says Amit Agrawal, another software engineer on the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team. His role was to develop the methodology and process for load testing.

Optimizing today for future growth tomorrow

Load testing helps Microsoft gain insight into the IoT sensor data it collects to give employees a better experience in its buildings. With a more stable and reliable platform, more employee experiences can be added, more facilities can be onboarded, and more teams can use this tool to make data quickly available. As a result, employees are more productive in their day-to-day tasks, saving them time during the week.

Looking forward, the team will onboard the company’s new Eastside Campus in the Puget Sound region to the Digital Integration Platform, where the company will be opening 17 new smart buildings starting in late 2023.

• Load testing is essential for any scalable platform, as it gives teams confidence in the scalability and load it can take in the future.
• Determine benchmarks for the system and run tests to ensure the system can meet these expectations.
• Performance testing is necessary to determine whether your system is behaving as expected to handle the current load and be optimized to handle extra load requests in the future.
• Identify your peak load and 3-5x of that load to see how the system performs under that stress. Perform stress tests on the whole platform and each component.

• Check out inside Microsoft’s smart building in Herzliya, Israel.
• Read more about accelerating Microsoft’s global real estate transformation with Microsoft Digital.
• Discover how Microsoft operations evolve with Azure.
• Look into building Microsoft’s employee-centric experience.

The post Listening to millions of IoT building sensor readings with load testing appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

For many guests, a building lobby is the first impression they get of Microsoft, so it’s important to make it a positive experience. After years of using a variety of third-party and self-created visitor management systems (VMS) to manage its lobbies across over 400 buildings, the company developed its own GMS with the goal of creating a quick, seamless, and personalized guest experience for anyone who visits the company in person.

The success of this program is to ensure employees and anyone else visiting a Microsoft building is able to check in efficiently and seamlessly, and for lobby hosts to provide a welcoming environment for guests.

—Katy Flaherty, services manager, Global Workplace Services

“The success of this program is to ensure employees and anyone else visiting a Microsoft building is able to check in efficiently and seamlessly, and for lobby hosts to provide a welcoming environment for guests,” says Katy Flaherty, a services manager on the Global Workplace Services team who manages the lobby experience for Microsoft buildings in the Puget Sound region. “The lobby really is the first impression of Microsoft.”

If the tool doesn’t work for our lobby hosts, then it won’t work for our guests.

—Jessie Go, app manager, Global Workplace Services

[Discover how Microsoft is creating the digital workplace. Learn how Microsoft is accelerating its global real estate transformation. Check out how Microsoft is powering its smart building with Microsoft Azure Digital Twins. Learn how Microsoft is enabling a modern support experience within the company.]

Standardizing guest management

Lobby hosts are the first human touchpoint a guest has when they visit a Microsoft building. To create the best experience possible, these hosts need tools that allow them to put the guest first.

“If the tool doesn’t work for our lobby hosts, then it won’t work for our guests,” says Jessie Go, an app manager on the Global Workplace Services team responsible for deploying a consistent experience at all global Microsoft lobbies.

Our primary goal is to have a global standard and consistent experience for all our guests. We wanted to remove the anxiety of our guests related to visiting our campuses by preparing them well for the visit in advance. This way we could set them up to perform their best and succeed when they are here.

—Vivekanand Pandey, GMS lead program manager, Microsoft Digital

These older systems created privacy, security, and compliance issues. Lobby hosts didn’t have proper visibility into how many people were going in and out of buildings daily, or how many were in a building at any given time. Additionally, the systems didn’t allow for any customizations based on that building’s specific business requirements. These issues resulted in a disjointed guest experience.

Creating a cloud-based, connected experience

The Microsoft Guest Management System is a first-party solution developed in partnership with the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team. The GMS provides a connected experience through a digital transformation-ready cloud-based architecture. It’s a web-based system powered by Microsoft Azure that integrates with Microsoft Outlook for scheduling a visit with ease and allows guests to easily pre-register and prepare for their visit to campus. The system is built on a React frontend with .NET core backend and Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB for managing data. It uses core Microsoft Azure features like Azure Service Bus, Azure Search Service, Azure Functions-Serverless Apps and Computing, and Azure API Management to deliver the application suite.

“Our primary goal is to have a global standard and consistent experience for all our guests,” says Vivekanand Pandey, the GMS lead program manager for Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company. “We wanted to remove the anxiety of our guests related to visiting our campuses by preparing them well for the visit in advance. This way we could set them up to perform their best and succeed when they are here.”

The GMS allows guests to check-in on the web or at an arrive kiosk in the lobby. Meeting hosts can send an invite, which records a guest’s upcoming visit in the system and provides a welcome email to the guests to make them familiar with the visitation process. Guests may also access a guest portal to pre-register in advance of their visit, making check-in a breeze when they arrive.

Upon registration, guests are given a universal QR code that allows them to be identified and navigate throughout the building and the campus. The QR code allows a guest to access the building’s turnstile and onsite parking, where enabled, and can even get them a free coffee in the future.

We built a solid, event-driven architecture that offers a modern experience on the front end and where you can easily add new components and features quickly.

—Prabha Kalpathy, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

To power the GMS, Microsoft opted for an event-driven architecture-based system that is completely serverless. This enabled the team to create the tool cost-effectively while scaling quickly to onboard new locations. What’s more, the components and code are reusable, which allows for easy integrations and modifications, and can be used by other teams through a shared library.

Not only is the back end easy to operate, but the front end is too; it was explicitly designed to deliver a modern user experience. As a result, new workflows and features can be quickly built and customized for each location based on the system’s unique wants and needs.

“We built a solid, event-driven architecture that offers a modern experience on the front end and where you can easily add new components and features quickly,” says Prabha Kalpathy, principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital.

Global rollout

Within 20 months, the GMS was built and implemented in Microsoft lobbies around the world, starting in the Puget Sound region. Currently, over 357 sites have been onboarded to the new GMS, with 100 more sites either in the process or planned. Since the rollout, over 1 million guests have been welcomed to Microsoft campuses via the GMS.

Now, check-in is a seamless experience, and lobby hosts are more productive, informed, and helpful in creating a great experience for guests visiting the campus.

“The features and functionality of our buildings do great marketing for us,” Go says. “Guests see the technology solutions and services we provide and want those in their own office buildings.”

The true win with this system is being able to make major and minor customization enhancements on the back end to accommodate site-specific requirements and future business needs.

—Rhonda Cone, facilities management practice lead, Global Workplace Services

The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t slow down rollout; in fact, it allowed for the Employee Experience team to further meet guest needs by creating a touchless, contactless check-in experience via a mobile device. The GMS also allowed for easy and seamless management of a COVID-19 vaccination clinic at one of the Microsoft campuses in the Puget Sound region, which demonstrates its use beyond just for meetings and events.

A new era of transformation

While building the GMS, Microsoft retired its “visitor” nomenclature, instead using “guest” to describe those visiting one of the company’s campuses. This lends itself to a more personal and better connection with guests in order to create a memorable and personalized campus visit.

With a full end-to-end experience, Microsoft can now control and curate features and enhancements to continually adjust to guest and lobby host needs. Working together, teams in Global Workplace Services and Microsoft Digital can adjust the lobby experience from building to building.

“The true win with this system is being able to make major and minor customization enhancements on the back end to accommodate site-specific requirements and future business needs,” says Rhonda Cone, facilities management practice lead on the Global Workplace Services team. She manages the lobby experience for all Microsoft buildings around the globe.

Additionally, Microsoft now can package versions of the GMS as a product to sell to other companies and property managers. It’s a tool that can grow with a company as its customer experience journey changes and as its needs evolve.

The big win is improving the experience guests have when they visit Microsoft, especially for those who are having their first experience with the company.

“We were able to create a solution that’s a balance between hospitality and security,” Go says. “By thinking outside the box and being flexible, we built a personalized, seamless, and easy guest experience for anyone visiting one of Microsoft’s locations around the globe.”

• Know the problem you’re trying to solve.
• Research the steps you will need to take to get where you want to go.
• Understand your customers and their needs so you can keep them at the center of your solution.
• Understand the products and capabilities available in the market that you can use to shape your product.
• Try to find a good balance between hospitality and security.
• Be flexible and creative when it comes to finding the right solution for you.

• Discover how Microsoft is creating the digital workplace.
• Go inside Microsoft’s smart building in Herzliya, Israel.
• Learn how Microsoft is accelerating its global real estate transformation.
• Check out how Microsoft is powering its smart building with Microsoft Azure Digital Twins.
• Learn how Microsoft is enabling a modern support experience within the company.
• Check out how Microsoft is moving to a next-generation SIEM with Microsoft Azure Sentinel.

The post Transforming Microsoft’s lobby experience with a new Microsoft Guest Management System appeared first on Inside Track Blog.