Microsoft Outlook Calendar Analytics: Control Your Time

Executives at Microsoft are using calendar analytics to save themselves something precious—their time.

No matter who you are, if you don’t stay on top of your calendar, it can take on a life of its own. It’s very easy to lose control of how many events and meetings we have each day, week, or month. We all want to make sure we’re using our time wisely and that it aligns with broader goals and deliverables.

Using the Microsoft Power Platform combined with Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft executives, directors, and teams now have more visibility into how they spend their time. They can do this thanks to a new internally built solution that uses the Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Outlook to analyze their calendar data.

Gaining insight into executives’ calendars

Microsoft executives are under considerable pressure to rationalize their calendars, to learn where they focus their time, with whom they want to focus their time with, and then use that data to prioritize their time. They want answers to questions such as “How much time am I spending talking to HR?”, “How many one-on-ones am I taking?”, “How much time am I spending talking to customers and partners?”, and “Am I going to meet my objectives and key results?”

We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time. We used our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.

—Claire Sisson, principal PM, Productivity Studio

To overcome this challenge, executive assistants and chiefs of staff for Microsoft’s top executives were tasked with finding a way to drill down into the data to see how these senior leaders were spending their time. They extrapolated calendar data and added events, and then created categories to make sense of the data in Microsoft Excel.

Then, they turned to the Productivity Studio team in Microsoft Digital Employee Experiences.

“We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time,” says Claire Sisson, a principal PM who leads the Productivity Studio team. “We used our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.”

Leveraging the Microsoft Power Platform

Martin engages in conversation (left), and Kumar Jangir poses outside. — Joe Martin (left) is a senior product manager for Productivity Studio, a team in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience that helps business groups across the company enable product stacks using Microsoft 365 products. Naveen Kumar Jangir (right) helped with the technical implementation of the solution on the Microsoft Power Platform.

Microsoft’s Productivity Studio team helps business groups across the company enable product stacks using Microsoft 365 products. For this project, the team was tasked with creating an automated way to capture calendar data, store it, and analyze it so executives could quickly see how they were spending their time.

It settled on a low-code/no-code solution based on the Microsoft Power Platform that leverages Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power BI. A Power App connects the solution to Microsoft Outlook and enables you to configure your calendar so you can determine what events you want to include or exclude. Power Automate captures the data from the calendar and brings it into the database (Dataverse). Power BI is used on top of Dataverse in a Power App dashboard to get insights on the imported data.

Because Microsoft Power Apps are low code/no code, any IT admin or citizen developer can edit the solution based on their needs. The platform also enables them to build a solution themselves fast using repeatable parts. So, the solution is easily extendable for easier customization.

“You can use Power Apps to digitize and automate processes much faster than you can with traditional custom software,” says Evan Lew, a group product manager for Microsoft Power Apps. “And low code means you can more easily make adjustments and tailor the solution to the users’ needs.”

When it came to building a solution that would help the company’s executives wrangle their time, one of the Productivity Studio’s most significant challenges was to reduce the number of steps and button clicks during installation. It took more than 30 steps to install and onboard an early version of the solution. The team turned to Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power BI to solve this.

The solution they built is available to Microsoft 365 customers via Microsoft AppSource. External customers can get the Microsoft Power Apps package here and the Microsoft Power BI package here. AppSource offers various applications and solutions that work with Windows365 products, allowing users to enable innovation, drive business outcomes, and help them get more done with the tools they already have.

The solution is the most beneficial for people with several different categories of meetings or events they need to analyze.

—Joe Martin, senior product manager, Productivity Studio

“We think this solution will help a lot of executives and other leaders get more out of their most limited resource—their time,” says Naveen Kumar Jangir, the lead Microsoft 365 architect from Microsoft partner Avanade who helped build the solution.

More control over your calendar

With this solution, Microsoft executives can use the data for strategic decision-making regarding how they spend their time. They can now more effectively impact the organization and focus on areas that are more impactful to overall team and organization goals.

“The solution is the most beneficial for people with several different categories of meetings or events they need to analyze,” says Joe Martin, a senior product manager for Productivity Studio.

Currently, the solution has been deployed for a handful of teams for various Microsoft executives, with the goal for it to be deployed to senior leaders across every group. Executives are already using it to see a breakdown of their events, including time spent talking with various departments, the number of one-on-one meetings that they’re holding, time spent talking to customers and partners, and time spent at conferences.

This project also allowed the Productivity Studio team to combine Microsoft products in new and innovative ways that empower executives and others who need to improve how they manage their calendars. It can take learnings and data about how the products function and give it to the product team, improve it, and empower more people. Productivity Studio provides an opportunity to centralize innovation and give back to the products through feedback, product gaps, and new solutions.

“We wanted to create solutions that enable our senior leadership to make the most of their time,” says Sisson. “We used elements of our technology stack to close gaps in the tools they were using to manage their calendars.”

Reuse versus reinvent: Consider if you can use tools you already have to transform your internal business processes.
Stay curious: See how you can leverage your current stack to empower your users the most.
Listen to your users: Continually get feedback from your users to see what scenarios you can help improve or optimize.
Use product limitations to innovate: Create solutions to fill in the gaps that your product might have to build a more robust product.