This article explains how AskCody Insights collects data, and when, and which data points are collected from Microsoft Exchange and the AskCody Platform.
Like the rest of the AskCody Platform, Insights leverages data from your Microsoft Exchange. When your employees use Outlook to book meetings, and the AskCody Platform to manage meetings, it generates data. This data will be used to automatically generate insights and analytics dashboards in Insights. This means that you don’t have to extract or export Outlook meetings into Excel spreadsheets to understand meeting room utilization anymore.
This article covers:
How is Insights collecting data?
When enabling Insights on your calendars in the AskCody Management Portal, it will start collecting data points from your Exchange and AskCody Platform. Data from Microsoft Exchange are collected and any sensitive personal information (PII) is removed before processed by the AskCody Data Factory for fast, scalable, and reliable data processing, built on Microsoft Azure, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Blob Storage. The following illustration can give you an overview of how it is all connected.
If you wish to read more about AskCody Data Processing, please click here.
Power BI is Microsoft’s business intelligence platform on which the Insights is built, making it powerful, scalable, reliable, and secure. Insights is leveraging on Power BI's built-in reporting tools making it possible to provide intelligent reports and export of data, directly from the dashboards of Insights; giving you the data you need, in your hands, the way you want it.
Not only will Insights display data from the day you enable Insights on your calendars in the AskCody Management Portal, but Insights also extracts Exchange data up to 13 months back in time, before you had AskCody. This means that you can start benefiting from the data from the moment* you enable Insights.
* It might take a while to generate data in the Insights dashboards depending on how many calendars are enabled with Insights. Read more here.
When is Insights collecting data?
As mentioned above, Insights starts collecting data from your Exchange and the AskCody Platform the minute you enable Insights on your calendars in the AskCody Management Portal. After the initial data collection has started, Insights will collect data once a week (Sunday) at 00.00 (UTC), meaning you will see data the following Monday. One thing to notice is: Insights only collects data from activated calendars.
The calendars in the Management Portal can be either Active or Inactive, depending on the use of the calendar. Furthermore, Insights can be Enabled and Disabled on a calendar, to exclude some meeting rooms from showing data in Insights. Both cases can impact whether or not data will be collected and displayed in the Insights dashboard.
The following illustration will highlight when Insights collects data based on if a calendar is active/inactive or Insights is enabled/disabled.
June:
Both Room 1 and Room 2 have their calendar Active and Insights Enabled.
Insights will collect data for both Room 1 and Room 2 for June and data will be available and shown in Insights 13 months back.
July:
Room 1 has the calendar Inactive and Insights Enabled. Room 2 has the calendar Active and Insights Disabled.
Insights will not collect data for Room 1 in July and no data will be visible in Insights for July. But data from June will be visible in Insights.
Insights will collect data for Room 2 in July but data will not be visible in Insights in July and back in time.
August:
Both Room 1 and Room 2 have their calendar Active and Insights Enabled. (The same as June).
Insights will collect data for Room 1 for August, but data in July will not be visible in Insights. Data for June will be visible in Insights.
Insights will collect data for Room 2 in August and the data will be visible in Insights.
Data points collected in Insights
Insights collect data from the following calendar types: Room and Desk. Not the calendar types Person or Equipment. This means that if you have Personal calendars/offices or equipment as calendars in the Management Portal and you wish to see data for them in Insights, you need to set these as a Room under the calendar type. See how here.
If you still want to differentiate between the different types of calendars (eg. a room, offices, hot desks, and equipment), we recommend that you set the resource type to match the calendar.
The personal calendars integrated with the AskCody Management Portal are mostly used to be displayed on the AskCody Meeting Dashboards.
See the full list of data points collected from Microsoft Exchange and the AskCody Platform below.
Data points collected from Exchange
- Meeting ID
- Object ID
- Meeting start date
- Meeting end date
- Meeting start time
- Meeting end time
- Type of resource (room, equipment, desk)
- Number of internal attendees*
- Number of external attendees*
- Number of optional attendees*
- Number of required attendees*
- Number of accepted attendees*
- Number of declined attendees*
- Number of internal organizers*
- Number of external organizers*
No sensitive personal data is being displayed in the Insights. To read more about AskCody Data Processing click here.
Data points collected from the AskCody Platform
- Resource name
- Location name
- Room types*
- Opening hours
- Meeting room purpose
- Meeting room Equipment/Services
- The capacity of meeting rooms
Find all Room types with descriptions here.