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Microsoft 365 Data + Microsoft Fabric better together

See Arun Ulagaratchagan’s blog post to read the full Microsoft Fabric preview announcement.
 
Microsoft Graph is the gateway to data and intelligence in Microsoft 365. It provides a unified model to access the tremendous amount of data in Microsoft 365 including Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Viva Insights, and more. Use the wealth of data in Microsoft Graph to build forward looking business insights to unlock insights on customer relationships, business processes, security and compliance, and people productivity.

Now you can bring all your Microsoft 365 data into Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft 365 Data Integration for Microsoft Fabric is a feature of the new Microsoft Fabric solution, which enables you to manage your Microsoft 365 alongside your other data sources in one place with a suite of analytical experiences that seamlessly work together to transform your data into competitive advantage. Microsoft Fabric includes Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, Real-Time Analytics, Data Science, and Power BI, all hosted on a lake-centric SaaS solution for simplicity and to maintain a single source of truth. Learn more about Fabric.


  

Access all your Microsoft 365 data though Microsoft Graph Data Connect

To access your Micrsoft 365 in the Microsoft Graph for enterprise analytics, we use Microsoft Graph Data Connect which a secure, scalable solution that enables you to copy relevant Microsoft 365 datasets into Microsoft Fabric.
 
In the below diagram, you can see just some types of Microsoft 365 data that organizations get though Microsoft Graph Data Connect. There are datasets available from a wide variety of Microsoft 365 sources, including Azure Active Directory, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Viva Insight, and Microsoft Groups—and the list is growing. For the full list: Datasets, regions, and sinks supported by Microsoft Graph Data Connect


 
Microsoft 365 datasets comes ready for analysis. We deliver data in three formats: basic, cleaned, and curated.

  • Basic datasets: Datasets generated from raw customer created content and inputs from M365 Applications and Services
  • Cleaned datasets: Datasets generated by either normalization and de-duplication from Basic Datasets. Or datasets created from user activity or behavior signals in M365.
  • Curated datasets: Datasets custom generated for a specific use case or analytics scenarios. Or datasets from 1P M365 analytics application for their extensibility.

 

Data Engineers extend existing data models with Microsoft 365 data

Getting started is easy! In Fabric, once you’ve created a data pipeline, you’ll see the copy assistant with the new Microsoft 365 connector (shown in the diagram below). Simply click to set up your link to Microsoft 365 through Microsoft Graph Data Connect. Once your connection is configured, you can then choose and select the dataset that you want to bring into Fabric. Then, with just a few clicks, your Microsoft 365 data appears in OneLake in the analytics-ready delta parquet format.

Once you open OneLake from your workspace, you now can immediately see the copied Microsoft 365 data and leverage all the analytics tools available in Fabric to generate insights. Plus, you’re also taking advantage of the enterprise governance and security that helps protect all data in Fabric.


  

Data Analysts build actionable enterprise analytics with Microsoft 365 data

Once your Microsoft 365 data is in Microsoft Fabric OneLake, you can construct use cases empowered by Microsoft 365 data from Power BI. Insights built from Microsoft 365 data come from passive network analysis, as compared to self-reported surveys, measure interactions through existing email and meeting data resulting in minimal missing data, less upfront investment, and reduced time burden. This also means that you can access all your historic Microsoft data for use cases including:

  • Information Oversharing is a security and compliance use case powered by our newly available SharePoint usage and activity (ODSP) dataset. This allows customers to better understand how Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) labels are constantly protecting SharePoint data, maintain information boundaries, and establish new rules based on how sensitive data is managed and classified. To learn more about Information Oversharing, watch an on-demand webinar: M365 Data + Synapse Webinar

  • Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) is a structured way to visualize how communications occur within the organization. Organizational Network Analysis harness information flows and team connectivity to unlock productivity, innovation, employee engagement, and organizational change. This can be useful in a wide variety of network related insights to:
    • Measure the effectiveness of an agile transformation progress or enablement session. Conversely, detect post-merger integration or post-reorg issues.
    • Reduce management escalations with the strategic introduction of shared services.
    • Accelerate time to new hire integration (onboarding) by identifying gaps in shared learning to drive cross organizational learnings and best practices.
    • Promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace by uncovering demographic imbalances.


 
Matthew Matteucci, Professor, Department of Electronic Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano notes that “Customers will better understand their human capital. From there, they can reduce stressors or react to other factors that prompt people to seek other employment— that’s our ultimate goal.”
  

Microsoft Graph Data Connect now available in 14 regions

Microsoft Graph Data Connect is now enabled in 14 regions (nine new regions since January 2023). The following table indicates which Microsoft 365 regions are supported and the corresponding Azure regions required for data movement (see below). Click here to learn more about enabled regions.

Cross Geography Access Updates: Currently, tenants with multi-geo capability enabled in Microsoft 365 (link) can only access Microsoft Graph Data Connect datasets in their respective geographic location. This means that data across multiple regions need to be manually joined together to prepare for analysis, which can often be a slow, error-prone process. With this update, we remove that limitation for companies with multi-geo tenants.
 
However, to maintain stringent data residency requirements, we have intentionally scoped this only for directory related datasets: Azure Active Directory (see here) and Microsoft Groups (see here). These datasets enable users to run system metadata analysis including our Information Oversharing use case.
  

Enhanced Security with Microsoft Graph Data Connect

Microsoft Graph Data Connect is a highly secure, governed, and privacy centric environment that ensures your sensitive PII data is secure through every step of the process. We are continuing to build enhanced security capabilities.
 
We are announcing support for Azure Managed VNet-Integration Runtime through Mapping Data Flows in Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics. To connect from Azure today, whether you’re in Azure Synapse or Azure Data Factory, there needs to be a service in Azure that talks with the Microsoft Graph Data Connect service.
 
Integration Runtime (IR) is an Azure powered service used by Azure Data Factory and Azure Synapse Analytics pipelines to provide data integration capabilities across different network environments. Microsoft Graph Data Connect customers leverage this feature to ensure a secure data flow between Azure and Microsoft 365 services to the customer’s destination storage account.
 
Managed V-net IR with Mapping Data Flows allows customers to better protect their sensitive data by ensuring communication only happens through their private and protected network. This capability aims to improve network level security during data egress within Microsoft Graph Data Connect by connecting to a private VPN with secure credentials. This new capability allows for a simplified security set up as customers no longer need to use the public internet for data transit and can set up their private endpoints to ensure more secure, end-to-end data movement.
 
Microsoft Graph Data Connect now supports Managed v–net IR as a security feature to meet the needs of customers in highly regulated industries that care deeply about secure data storage, encryption, and isolation.
  

Extensive Joint Solution Ecosystem

Microsoft Graph Data Connect has collaborated with a rich network of enterprise technology vendors who have built powerful, joint solutions on Microsoft 365 data:

GainX: Build a comprehensive map of information flow and provide a data-driven, systemic view of how an organization is actually functioning. Learn more.
HCL: Conduct better workforce management, performance analysis, improvement measures to understand employee productivity.
Infosys: Gather feedback, identify areas for improvement, and take action to improve employee engagement, productivity, and retention.
Lotis Blue: Utilizing organizational network analysis (ONA) to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion outcomes. Also applying ONA principles to improve customer relationships and revenue velocity
Neo4j: Construct security and compliance analytics to uncover the hidden patterns of communication in your organization. Learn more.
Neudesic: Extensibility of Microsoft 365 data and Viva Insights collaboration metrics into customer’s Azure environment to further display relevant metrics for employees within other systems and portals.
Parabole: Illustrate true cost to maintain the channel, time spent with partners by product, and mismatches between partner investment & partner value.
TCS: Identify patterns and trends in employee behavior during weekends. Gain insights into how weekend working affects overall employee happiness scores.
Veldhoen: Facilitate collaboration and connections between various business units within the company as a way to drive innovation.
Wipro: Enable your organization to effectively manage and classify data classification during mergers, acquisitions, and divesture scenarios.

  

Microsoft 365 Data Integrations

Microsoft Graph Data Connect is natively integrated to many Azure services. Here are some that are now available:

  

Conclusion

Microsoft Graph Data Connect empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions and gain valuable insights that can drive growth and innovation. With Microsoft Graph Data Connect, organizations can quickly access and extract Microsoft 365 data at scale, in a secure and privacy-compliant format. To learn more visit: Microsoft Graph Data Connect | Access data in bulk
 
In Microsoft Fabric, all your data sources are in one place with a suite of analytical experiences that seamlessly work together to transform your data into a competitive advantage. By integrating in this way, organizations can take advantage of the vast suite of compute and storage options in Fabric while staying compliant with industry standards and keeping their data secure.
  

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview. Try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for the free trial—no credit card information required. Everyone who signs up gets a fixed Fabric trial capacity, which may be used for any feature or capability from integrating data to creating machine learning models. Existing Power BI Premium customers can simply turn on Fabric through the Power BI admin portal. After July 1, 2023, Fabric will be enabled for all Power BI tenants.
 
Sign up for the free trial. For more information read the Fabric trial docs.

  

Other resources

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:

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