Garden Math: IoT Sensors, Fabric Eventhouses, and Data Engineering in Action

When they’re not working on cloud and data projects, Lenore and her pollen-averse husband Cliff attempt to manage a 20×40 garden allotment with no running water and wildly mixed results. Luckily, this pair of dataphiles has something better than gardening talent: real-time telemetry, Raspberry Pis, and an unreasonable willingness to monitor soil moisture like it’s mission control.

This demo-driven session shows how we built an end-to-end IoT pipeline using Fabric Real-Time Analytics to understand and optimize a very analog system: our garden. We’ll cover:

• Building vs. buying IoT sensors to track key garden inputs like sunlight (lux) and soil moisture
• Routing continuous data into Fabric Real-Time Analytics (Eventhouses) and Real-Time Hub
• Exploring real-time data using KQL
• Leveraging Fabric notebooks to incorporate crop requirements data and pollen-tracking APIs
• Creating automated alerts and dashboards to guide decisions and prevent horticultural disaster

While our goals are more kohlrabi than KPIs, garden management often mirrors real-world business challenges. Attendees will learn practical patterns for ingestion, enrichment, and alert creation using Fabric’s real-time data stack—patterns they can reuse across manufacturing, finance, and operational analytics scenarios.

Will this data-driven gardening actually improve yields? Maybe. But we’ll definitely have the telemetry to explain whatever happens. Expect practical guidance, real-world demos, and just enough gardening chaos to keep things interesting.

D365 Data 101

Working with data in D365 applications gets a lot easier once you know what’s going on under the hood. While most users don’t need a developer-level knowledge of D365’s data infrastructure, everyone benefits from understanding how the data infrastructure that supports each D365 application works together.

This low-jargon tour of how D365 data flows from your fingertips to underlying data models (and back!) will help you better understand both how and why D365 systems work the way they do. Learn the underlying data anatomy of each “family” of D365 applications, including how that logic defines your options for integration with other tools, such as Fabric and the Power Platform. Leave this session ready to work with your D365 app of choice with less frustration, greater understanding, and more success!

Mastering the BI Mullet Part 1: Concepts & Strategy

The Challenge: Your organization has big data dreams but limited data staff. Report requests are piling up, and your small team can't possibly build everything users need—but you also can't let BI turn into the Wild West.

The Solution: A BI Mullet.

Microsoft calls it "Managed self-service BI"—discipline at the core and flexibility at the edge. This hybrid approach empowers end users to create their own reports using centrally maintained systems, so your data team can focus on the foundational work that matters most.

But here's the catch: with the wrong systems (or no systems at all), your BI Mullet gets messy fast. This first half of the session establishes the conceptual foundation for growing your BI Mullet with confidence.

You'll learn:
-The key principles of Managed self-service BI and why traditional approaches fail in resource-constrained environments

-How to identify what belongs "at the core" (centralized discipline) vs. "at the edge" (flexible self-service) in your organization

-Strategic architecture decisions that enable scalable self-service without sacrificing governance

-How Power BI semantic models, Purview, and Power Automate work together to create a sustainable BI ecosystem

Mastering the BI Mullet Part 2: Implementation & Demos

Now that you understand the BI Mullet strategy, let's see it in action. This demo-driven second half walks through how you can build core aspects of the BI Mullet that, together, will protect a small data team's time and help maximize their impact.

Demo 1: Reduce "Shadow BI" Risks with Thoughtful Use of Admin Features

-Workspace governance settings & deployment pipelines
-Tenant setting management
-Certification & sensitivity labels
-Usage monitoring to identify what's actually working

Demo 2: Make Your Power BI Semantic Model "People-Friendly"

-Best practices for naming conventions
-Features that help report writers easily identify the right fields, measures, and tables
-How to reconcile conflicting department-specific needs (e.g., different date hierarchy requirements)
-Bonus tip: Leveraging a hidden "help" tab that can feature key links, instructions, or FAQs

Demo 3: Create a Custom Report Theme & Starter Template

-Design a custom theme that applies your organization's style guide by default
-Build a minimal starter template that builds in consistency while minimizing the report writer's learning curve

Demo 4: Leverage Purview's Unified Catalog

-Key features that help users find the right data independently
-Using Purview to connect the dots between business contexts, data products, and access policies
-How data quality rules and scanning can prevent unwelcome surprises at the report writing stage
-One practical (manual) way to integrate Unified Catalog metadata into your Power BI Semantic Model

Bonus Demo: Use SharePoint Forms & Power Automate Flows to Support Decentralized Collaboration

-How (and why) to create SharePoint forms that capture new data requests or data quality issues
-Building a Power Automate flow that routes requests to the right approvers for streamlined updates
-Designing approval workflows that scale without overwhelming your small team

The Takeaway: Every BI Mullet will look a little different based on your organization's needs. You'll leave with concrete implementation patterns you can adapt immediately—business in the front, party in the back, and governance all the way through.

Beyond the Tech: Improving Collaboration in Data Governance

Most data problems are really people problems in a trench coat.

Sure, data governance tools can make it easy to implement data quality & governance (DQ&G) policies, but implementation is the easy part. The hard part? Defining–and getting your people to actually agree on–the details in those policies.

No technology can decide for you who should be the data steward for which data points, nor can any DQ&G software resolve internal disputes over who should be able to access what sensitive data.

Organizations often rush to implement new data systems before they resolve existing data issues. While it’s certainly more fun to explore the latest tech, the greatest risk to any data project is not choosing the wrong tool, but failing to resolve ongoing challenges related to security, data quality, and consistent data categorization and usage.

Because conversations around DQ&G can become so contentious, we believe that collaborative communication strategies are an essential part of the DQ&G toolkit, one that could potentially save your organization from spending thousands in project overruns and months of delays down the road.

Join self-identified Data Plumber Lenore Flower and collaboration expert Brian Stauber to learn practical strategies for tackling the most stubborn roadblocks in your data governance plan. This deep dive will provide both practical communications skills and methodologies and core items to incorporate as you build (or grow) your organization’s DQ&G practice.

This session was originally presented at PASS Summit in Nov 2025 as a two-hour deep dive.

Choosing the Right Reporting Tool for the Job (D365 Finance & Power BI)

The right reporting tool can make a huge difference in development costs and user adoption but knowing which tool to use (and when) can be a challenge. During this session, users will learn when to use standard Power BI reporting, paginated reports, Excel-based reporting, customized Dynamics 365 Finance reports, OData, or a combination to meet their specific reporting needs. We will dive into the wealth of out-of-the-box reporting Dynamics 365 F&O has, where to look, and what changes users can make without having to engage in any type of code changes. Finally, we'll review common D365-to-report "data plumbing" approaches to demystify how your critical information gets from point A to point B.

This session was first presented at Community Summit NA in collaboration with the inestimable Lauren Wooll.