talk-data.com

Join Microsoft Reactor and the Microsoft MVP Award program for a new monthly tech talk series. Each installment of the MVP Feature Series, located at 11 Times Square, will feature two talks by MVPs and an hour of networking with the developer community!

1) As your development teams work and adopt AI, are they do it with a DevSecOps mindset?

Presenter: Mona Ghadiri

Learn how to design a secure DevSecOps program for your development teams that allows you to use AI while protecting from “pipeline to prompt”.

2) Transforming network and facility management with Visio and Power BI

Presenter: Scott Helmers

Power BI reports help you tell great stories by making your organization’s data visible and real. Visio diagrams help you communicate more effectively by providing visual representations of the real world. Too often, however, Power BI reports and Visio diagrams exist in isolation. What if you could combine the data connectivity and visualizations of Power BI with the graphical context of a Visio diagram? In this demo-filled session you’ll see examples that empower facility managers with data-driven floor plans; enhance network infrastructure management with visual inventories of servers, VMs, and apps; and visually illuminate skills in an organization chart. It’s surprisingly easy to do and it can all be accomplished in a web browser, which means you can create this magic on a Mac, a PC, or a tablet.

Greetings, data enthusiasts!

Our January meeting is scheduled for Monday, January 13th, at 5:30 pm! We will meet in person at: Rensselaer Chamber of Commerce, 90 4th Street, Troy, NY.

Please RSVP here if you are attending, so we can purchase an appropriate amount of food for everyone. Food will be ordered from a Bite of Xian in Troy. For this meeting, we are welcoming Scott Helmers, a Microsoft MVP hailing from the Boston area!

Our meeting schedule is as follows:

• 5:30 PM: Food, soft drinks, and networking
• 6:15 PM: Chapter news and announcements
• 6:30 PM: Presentation

We usually wrap up between 7:30 PM and 8:00 PM.

Scott helmers is presenting: Transforming Network and Facility Management with Visio and Power BI:

There’s no shortage of data in most organizations, but the existence of data isn’t enough. How do you leverage that data, learn from it, and draw insights that will help you move your organization forward?

One answer is to visualize the data in the context of a diagram, which is surprisingly easy to do when you know a little bit about Visio and Power BI. In this session, you’ll learn how to create Visio diagrams that “light up” with several types of visualizations. You’ll also appreciate how easy it is to drop a Visio diagram into Power BI and link it with other visuals so you can slice and filter data across multiple visuals with one click. The presence of the Visio diagram in Power BI adds context: you know exactly which rooms are too hot; which virtual machines are running apps that have failed; which network switch needs to be replaced and exactly where it’s located.

The examples used in this session are from a real customer project and include facility diagrams that incorporate drilldown from a regional view to a building to a floor, and then use heat maps to show property maintenance issues. You'll also see a theme park map in which buildings light up based on data about equipment they contain. Though this session features two specific case examples, the concepts apply much more broadly: If you have a diagram and corresponding data, you can visualize it using tools you already have.

Session: Imagine you have a dozen Power BI reports. One provides visual navigation through a corporate hierarchy, with hyperlinks that lead to the other eleven reports. Each of the eleven reports includes a visual table of contents, multiple report pages, and one drill-through detail page that is shared by the other pages. Your goal is to provide users with seamless navigation from the top of the hierarchy to the lowest level of detail, preferably without driving yourself crazy updating links among all of the various reports as things change (and you know they will!).

The real-world scenario for this setup was a resort owner that wanted floorplan-level Power BI reports for every hotel in a resort complex, while providing users in Teams with easy navigation anywhere in the corporate hierarchy. Your use case may be different but you probably have similar needs for visual navigation within a collection of detailed reports. In this session you’ll learn about a solution that involves page navigation links, URLs, filters, and bookmarks, all of which are organized in way that minimizes the work required to keep it all functioning.

Speaker: Scott Helmers Scott A. Helmers is a Partner at the Harvard Computing Group, a software and consulting firm that assists clients with understanding and implementing business process solutions. He is a co-inventor of TaskMap (www.taskmap.com), a Visio add-in that allows anyone to document, analyze, and improve their business processes. He has been named a Microsoft Valuable Professional (MVP) for Visio every year since 2008 and is the author of four books from Microsoft Press including Visio 2016 Step by Step (http://www.VisioStepByStep.com). He is also a course author for LinkedIn Learning (http://bit.ly/LiL-Author).