January Monthly CASSUG Meeting

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 is TBA (will be announced closer to the event). 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.