Fabric

From Insight to Action Inside Microsoft 365

Posted by Jens Vestergaard on in Community 0 Comment

Turning Data into Everyday Decisions with Microsoft 365

In today’s business landscape, the true value of data lies not just in its collection, but in its ability to drive timely, informed action. Yet, for many organizations, the journey from analytical insight to real-world impact is often slowed by disconnected tools and siloed workflows. What if your teams could access the latest business intelligence right where they work without ever leaving their core productivity apps?

With Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft 365, this vision becomes reality. By embedding data insights directly into familiar tools like Excel, Teams, and Outlook, organizations empower employees at every level to make smarter decisions, collaborate seamlessly, and respond proactively to changing conditions. No more toggling between dashboards and emails; actionable intelligence is now woven into the very fabric (see what I did there? 😏) of daily operations.

This blog post explores how integrating analytics into everyday workflows transforms not only how decisions are made, but also how organizations build a resilient, data-driven culture. Through real-world examples and practical strategies, discover how you can bridge the gap between insight and action; fueling agility, innovation, and sustained business growth.

Embedding Data Insights Directly into Daily Workflows

As organizations look to bridge the gap between analytical insights and daily decision-making, Microsoft Fabric empowers teams by seamlessly integrating data flows from OneLake through Power BI and directly into familiar Microsoft 365 applications such as Excel, Teams, and Outlook. This connected experience ensures that actionable intelligence is available at every touchpoint where work happens, streamlining collaboration and enabling users to embed dashboards, visualizations, and data-driven recommendations into their everyday workflows. To maximize adoption, leaders and managers should prioritize hands-on training, showcase quick wins within business units, and encourage a culture where employees regularly consult and share insights surfaced in their core productivity tools. By embedding analytics within the fabric (oops, not…) of daily operations, companies accelerate the translation of insights into strategic action fueling a more agile, informed, and data-driven organization.

Check out some of the public case studies that displays this approach:

Heathrow Airport Data-Driven Operations with Microsoft 365 and Power BI

Heathrow Airport leverages Power BI, embedded within Microsoft 365 tools, to provide real-time operational dashboards accessible to staff across departments. This integration enables instant access to current metrics and supports agile decision-making in fast-paced airport environments.

Heathrow prepares rather than reacts: uses data to deliver airport calm | Microsoft Customer Stories

Marks & Spencer: Empowering Employees with Embedded Analytics

Retail giant Marks & Spencer uses Microsoft Fabric’s data pipelines and Power BI to embed relevant business insights directly into Teams and Outlook. This approach helps store managers and staff receive timely updates and analytics, improving customer service and operational efficiency.

UK retailer, Marks and Spencer, uses Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI to drive powerful insights | Microsoft Customer Stories

Telstra: Streamlining Field Operations with Automated Insights

Australian telecom leader Telstra connects data sources using Microsoft Fabric and OneLake, delivering up-to-date analytics via Power BI dashboards within Microsoft 365 applications. Automated refreshes and workflow triggers ensure that field teams always have the latest insights for customer service and maintenance tasks.

City of London: Predictive Analytics for Public Services

The City of London Corporation integrates predictive analytics into routine communications with Microsoft 365 apps. By enabling feedback loops and tailored dashboards, different departments improve service delivery and strategic planning based on actionable, up-to-date data.

Using predictive analytics in local public services | Local Government Association

Driving Proactive Insights and Continuous Business Impact

Building on this momentum, organizations should also leverage Microsoft Fabric’s robust automation features, such as scheduled data refreshes and workflow triggers, to ensure insights remain current and relevant as business conditions evolve. By connecting data sources in OneLake with Power BI, teams can automatically surface the latest operational metrics, customer feedback, and performance trends directly inside their Microsoft 365 environment. This proactive approach empowers employees to make informed decisions faster, supports cross-functional alignment, and fosters continuous improvement. Ultimately, the integration of Fabric with Microsoft 365 not only democratizes access to data but also drives sustained business impact by turning everyday interactions into opportunities for insight-driven action.

Looking ahead, organizations can further amplify these benefits by fostering close collaboration between IT and business stakeholders to identify high-impact scenarios where embedded analytics can streamline processes and drive measurable improvements. Encouraging feedback loops and iterative enhancements within Microsoft 365 such as customizing dashboards for different roles or integrating predictive analytics into routine communications. As adoption matures, businesses not only gain from faster, more accurate decision-making but also build a culture of continuous learning, where actionable data is woven into the very fabric (oops, I did it again) of their daily operations and strategic planning.

Cleveland Clinic adopted Microsoft Power BI and Teams

Monitoring operational performance and patient outcomes, resulting in faster response times and improved care coordination.

Microsoft PowerPoint – BIAS-2022 Presentation – Mark Ruffing.pptx

Sustaining Momentum: Building a Resilient Data Culture for Long-Term Success

To sustain and scale these gains, organizations should invest in ongoing education, governance frameworks, and robust support structures that empower users at all levels to harness the full potential of integrated analytics within Microsoft 365. By cultivating data champions across departments and encouraging best-practice sharing, companies can drive widespread engagement and innovation. This continuous reinforcement ensures that as new features and use cases emerge within Microsoft Fabric and the broader Microsoft 365 suite, teams remain agile and equipped to extract maximum value from their data assets, transforming every interaction into an opportunity for business growth and competitive differentiation.

As Microsoft Fabric’s capabilities continue to evolve, organizations poised for long-term success will embrace a proactive mindset experimenting with advanced AI integrations, tailoring analytics for emerging business needs, and regularly revisiting their data strategies to ensure alignment with broader digital transformation goals. By facilitating ongoing dialogue between business leaders, IT professionals, and end users, companies can adapt swiftly to new opportunities and challenges, embedding a resilient data culture that not only supports current operations but also lays the groundwork for future innovation. This commitment to continuous improvement and cross-functional engagement transforms Microsoft 365 from a suite of productivity tools into a dynamic engine for insight-driven growth, ensuring that every strategic initiative is grounded in timely, actionable intelligence.

Siemens: Accelerating Digital Transformation Together

Optimize supply chain processes, driving efficiency and innovation across their global operations.

Microsoft and Siemens: Accelerating Digital Transformation Together | Microsoft Community Hub

Key Points:

  • Embedded Analytics: Microsoft Fabric enables organizations to deliver dashboards, visualizations, and recommendations directly into Microsoft 365 apps, making insights accessible and actionable for all users.
  • Adoption Strategies: Success depends on hands-on training, showcasing quick wins, and encouraging a culture of regular data consultation and sharing.
  • Automation & Proactivity: Features like scheduled data refreshes and workflow triggers ensure that insights remain current, supporting agile and informed decision-making

Resources:

OneLake – External Data Sharing

Posted by Jens Vestergaard on in Programming 1 Comment

At #MSIgnite Microsoft announced a new feature in Fabric that allows people from one organization to share data with people from another organization. You might ask yourself why is this even news, and rightly so. Up until last week, professionals have had to use tools like (S)FTP clients like FileZilla, Azure Storage Explorer, WeTransfer or similar products in order to share data. Some of these tools are in fact hard to use and/or understand for a great number of business users – they are familiar with Windows and the Office suite and not much more. This is all to be expected, as business users in general should focus on business stuff rather than IT stuff.

As of last week this picture has changed quite dramatically as Microsoft has introduced what they refer to as External Data Sharing in Microsoft Fabric. Even though this new feature involves some configuration from the IT department, once it’s setup the end user can actually be allowed to share data with external organizations through what looks to be the File Explorer! 🔥 At least it looks like the File Explorer, but is in fact another application end users will need to install on top, to enable this functionality. The tool is called OneLake File Explorer and is obviously a file explorer for OneLake in Microsoft Fabric. In the following diagram, Microsoft demonstrates the feature and even underlines that no data is copied from one tenant to the other – all data is shared in-place.

External data sharing in Microsoft Fabric – Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

Think about it just one more time – The end user will be able to, on their own device, copy and paste data from local folders to OneLake synchronized folders (also on their own device) which then gets synchronized to another tenant. The tool works just like the OneDrive application, which means that it keeps files in synch between your device and OneLake.

Admin Settings in Tenant A

Configuring the functionality requires the sharing organizations (Tenant A) to toggle a settings in their Fabric Admin section.

The setting “External Data Sharing” should be allowed, and it is recommended that this is allowed only to a specific security group for easier management of access through the IT department.

As per screenshot above, members of the security group “CatMan” are the only ones who are allowed to share externally. One note that is highlighted in the yellow box might be worth considering before using this feature.

The functionality will work, even if the receiving organization (Tenant B) does not allow sharing as described above.

Sharing from Tenant A

Suppose you already have a lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric, (otherwise here’s a great introduction on how to create that), and you want to share files or tables with an external business user or it-professional. Then the following steps will allow you just to do that.

I have uploaded my Important Business Numbers.xlsx spreadsheet in my folder File_Share. I need this file for my critical workloads in my BI analysis but I also want to share these numbers with a professional outside my organization.

From inside the workspace in Tenant A I can now (due to the configuration in the admin portal) choose to share data externally by clicking the three dots (…) on the lakehouse in question.

Choosing this option guides me to a wizard where I get to select what data items I would like to share. The supported item types are data residing in tables or files in lakehouses and mirrored databases.

In this case, I choose to share an entire folder named File_Share.

Clicking ‘Save and Continue‘ leads me to a new dialog, where I get to assign who I want to share this data with. Sharing in this way does NOT require Entra B2B guest user access but is relying on a dedicated Fabric-to-Fabric authentication mechanism. Also note that the sharer from Tenant A can’t control who has access to the data in Tenant B. Access can even be granted to guest users of Tenant B.

In this example the sharer can either choose to send the grant as an email, copy the link and send that through Teams or other option. The intended receive has 90 days to accept the invitation, after which the invitation expires.

Accepting share from Tenant B

In order for the user in Tenant B to accept the share, they have to have access to a lakehouse that becomes the target of the share. Please see link to setup a lakehouse.

Here the user Testy McTestify has created a workspace in Tenant B and also created a lakehouse called Tenant_B_Lakehouse.

Testy can now accept the share in more than one way, either by mail by clicking an accept button that directs him to the fabric portal where you will be guided through the next steps in accepting the invitation. Or Testy can simply click or paste in the link in a browser and begin the same journey as above. Either way, the below screen will be presented once authorization has completed.

Testy McTestify is a user in the domain @catmansolution.com (Tenant B) and the invite was sent from Tenant A which is @catman.bi – this information is also present in the dialog, along with details on what is shared.

Now Testy has to select the lakehouse that will house the referenced folder (in this case). Here Testy chooses Tenant_B_Lakehouse.

And the final step is to place the shared folder in the files hierarchy that exists in Tenant_B_Lakehouse, and here Testy just places the folder in the root.

Two notifications will pop up and inform you on the relevant actions taken.

As soon as that process is completed (within seconds) the files from the folder in Tenant A are available as if present in Tenant B

OneLake Explorer

Installing OneLake Explorer will allow Testy McTestify to access the same files and folders synchronized on his device. This is, as you can imagine, immensely powerful as almost every business user knows how to operate Windows File Explorer and OneDrive on their device – this is right up their alley and not some odd third party product that IT needs to whitelist for them alone. Chances are that OneLake Explorer is already in use in the organization and no further action from IT is needed.

I simply love the potential of this new feature that I feel has traveled well below the radar, covered by all the AI and CoPilot noise over the last couple of weeks.