Enable open conversations about the metrics that matter

Business Intelligence enables you to engage in richer conversations with your leadership about your business’ performance. Measuring that performance comes down to a few key metrics that matter. Your business depends on the successful outcome of productive conversations around these metrics. Therefore, facilitating these conversations easily is key to your long-term success.

Conversations happen in cycles

Your business reporting cycle dictates how and when executive attention is consumed. While everyone strives for real time data, different systems on different data refresh cycles may preclude this possibility. Therefore, it is important to look at your business analytics in the context of status meetings and town halls that happen as part of the day to day operations. Given the richness of the Office 365 and Power Platform tools, bringing them together better enables these conversations.

Power Platform and Office 365 can enable these conversations richly

Learn how these communications are best enabled using Microsoft Power BI, Yammer, Microsoft Teams, and Live Events together.

For the purposes of this post, we’ll take an existing Power BI dashboard in our Marquee Insights for Project Management and augment it with Yammer to enable the right conversations. The value of moving the conversation from email and in-person to right there on the dashboard improves the dialog around the data and enables others to participate in the conversation.

Why Yammer?

You may ask why Yammer instead of Teams? In this scenario, we want to support the conversation right on the Power BI dashboard. Yammer is designed to enable the conversation wherever it takes place, be it in SharePoint, Teams, Yammer, or Power BI, with its ability to be embedded.

This is a different approach from Teams. Teams approaches the problem as the single hub to have the conversation. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. We’ll explore the Teams approach in a subsequent post.

The Setup

We’ll break down the steps as follows.

• One-time actions
  • Confirm Yammer is correctly configured with Office 365
  • Set up your Yammer group for the conversation
  • Embed the Yammer forum in Power BI
• Recurring activity
  • Create a Live event in Yammer

Confirming Yammer is correctly configured with Office 365

For this scenario to work, your organization must have Enforce Office 365 identity selected, and you must be using Office 365 connected Yammer groups. This ensures that you are logging into Yammer with your Office 365 credentials.

How do you tell if this is set up already? If this is already configured, when you create or enter a Yammer group, you will see the following links in the right margin.

If you don’t see these links, your Yammer administrator will need to update Yammer’s configuration. For the configuration steps, go here. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/yammer/configure-your-yammer-network/enforce-office-365-identity#start-enforcing-office-365-identity-in-yammer

Setting up your Yammer group for the conversation

A person with the correct Yammer permissions can create new groups. To create a group,

Go into Yammer

• In the left navigation, under the All Company link, you should see Create a group.

  

• Click the Create a group link and the following dialog will appear

  

• Select Internal Group, fill out the Group Name, Group Members and select Private Access. You may choose whether to list this in the group directory.
• You group will open in Yammer

Embedding Yammer in your Power BI dashboard

To perform this step, you’ll have to have an existing Power BI Dashboard. Yammer groups are designed to be embedded within other products, such as SharePoint. We’ll use the generated embed Yammer group code to embed the discussion group within Power BI.

To embed a Yammer group in Power BI, do the following.

• Generate your Yammer group embed code
  • Access your Yammer group
  • Click the Embed this feed in your site link.
  • Click the Embed this feed in your site link. It’ll be under the Access Options heading as shown below.

    

• The Embed This Feed in Your Site dialog will appear as shown below.
• Ensure all the code is highlighted and right click, Copy to copy the code.

  

• Now switch to your Power BI workspace that contains your Power BI Dashboard.
• At the top of the page, click +Add Tile.

  

• Select Web Content under the Media section.

  

• Click Next.
• The second screen of the Add web content tile will open. Scroll down until you see the Content section.
• Paste in the Yammer group embed code
• Highlight the style=”height:800px;width:400px;” section of the code and delete it to ensure Yammer will completely fill the Power BI tile
• Click Apply

  

• You will see the Yammer forum appear in your dashboard as shown below in our Marquee Insights for Project Management™ Power BI based product.

  

Create a Live event in Microsoft Teams

On a recurring basis, you can use the Live event functionality to host your meetings. Live events make it easier to engage your audience and for them to participate in the conversation around the meeting’s content. It also provides an opportunity for those who couldn’t attend live to be a first-class participant in the conversation. Lastly, because your meetings recorded in Microsoft Stream by Live Meeting, the meeting content becomes discoverable from Microsoft Search.

We’ll use the dashboard hosted Yammer forum to host the Live event helps create an engaging conversation around your key metrics.

Scheduling a Live Event from Yammer

Access the Yammer group forum for this conversation to set up the Live Event. On the right side of the forum, under Group Actions, you will see a link for Create a Live Event.

When you click the link, you see the first of three New live event dialogs.

• In dialog 1, fill out the meeting details and click Next.

  

• In dialog 2, check the boxes to determine who has access to the video and provide a link to a support site. It is strongly recommended that you turn on Captions for accessibility reasons. You could put the link to the Yammer group here as well.
• Click Schedule.

  

• The resulting dialog will enable you to generate an Attendee link to send out to any invited attendees.

  

• The event will also show up in the side bar navigation in the Yammer group.

  

• If you click the link in Yammer, you will see the Join button to click.
• The meeting will then open Teams for the meeting to start.

  

• You will then see a screen like below, where the presenter is shown, and any questions posted in Yammer will also appear in Teams.

  

Producing a Live event

If you need more information on how to produce a Teams Live event, this article walks you through all the details. https://support.office.com/en-us/article/produce-a-live-event-using-teams-591bd694-121d-405c-b26d-730315e45a22#bkmk_produceyourbroadcast

More engaging conversations forthcoming about your metrics

We’ll expand on this topic a bit more in a subsequent post as to how more Office 365 products can be integrated with Power BI to enrich the experience even further. If you have any questions or comment, please post them below. If you wish a detailed demo of this experience with our Marquee Insights for Project Management product, please email us at hello@marqueeinsights.com