Your Summer Project: Build an AI Data Ready Foundation with Fabric
Envision IT is not a large enterprise, we are a team of 24. That doesn't mean we don't face the same challenges our mid-market and enterprise customers do. We have data in many different systems, and it is often duplicated. Figuring out where our master data is and ensuring the other systems are up-to-date is a tough problem most organizations don't solve well. Roll in everyone having their own Excels that become mission-critical, and it becomes a mess.
Here are the systems we use at Envision IT:
- HubSpot for CRM, marketing, and sales
- QuickBooks for our financials
- Our own legacy time tracking software we called SPLATT (Software Project Lifecycle and Time Tracking)
- Teams and SharePoint for communication and document collaboration
- Our Extranet User Manager product to invite clients into project workspaces in our Microsoft 365
The challenge is how do we integrate all of the different systems? Customers and contacts, not to mention project and license information sits in all of them. Which one is the master? The reality is a piece of the picture sits in each of them and there is no master. That's the problem we've been tackling and will be talking about.
Below is a diagram illustrating both the problem and the solution. We are using what is called a Medallion Master Data Management (MDM) approach. We'll get into it throughout the webinar series, but the main concept is that each application publishes its data (bronze data layer), and the MDM rationalizes it into a standard data format (silver data layer), decides who is master for each individual data point, and publishes it to a master dataset (gold data layer). Each system can then be updated with master data it doesn't own so they are consistent.
Don't worry if this seems far too abstract. In our five-part Microsoft Fabric Summer Webinar Series, we will outline the architectural patterns we've developed and successfully implemented in our own tenant to consolidate scattered SaaS data into a reliable foundation for AI Search, Power BI, and Copilot. Each session will build on the last, grounded in real projects and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.
We’re excited to share this knowledge with you. Grab a coffee, get comfortable, and join us for a summer of Microsoft Fabric learning.
Session 1: Getting Your SaaS Systems to Talk with Fabric
We'll show you how to connect Finance, Sales, HR, and Ops using a medallion Master Data Management approach in Microsoft Fabric. You'll walk away knowing how to define field-level authority rules, build a trustworthy golden record, and create an integration pattern you can reuse across every SaaS system in your stack, without rebuilding it for each entity.
Tuesday, June 23 | 11-11:45 AM ET
Session 2: Teaching Your SaaS Systems to Listen to Each Other — Pushing Master Data Back into Source Systems
Once you have established a reliable gold layer and development methodology, the next step is to reintegrate that data into the systems that need it. We will discuss the write-back pattern for off-the-shelf SaaS systems and custom applications, including how to implement it securely, and how your business works better when all systems are aligned with the same truth.
Tuesday, July 14 | 11-11:45 AM ET
Session 3: Managing Fabric Development with Azure DevOps and Git
Fabric is a powerful tool, but without source control and a proper development lifecycle, things can quickly become fragile. Before we think about updating mission-critical systems, let's get the Fabric elements under source control in Git, and set up a pattern for deploying through Azure DevOps from dev to test to production. In this session, we will discuss how to effectively manage Fabric development using DevOps and Git. We will cover topics such as branching, deployment, and best practices to ensure your data platform remains stable as it scales.
Stay tuned for details.
Session 4: Your Business Users Are Sabotaging Copilot in Excel One Paste at a Time
It is both impressive and frightening how much of most businesses runs on Excel, and not just the finance team. The challenge is that often business decisions are being made on the wrong information in those Excels. Layer in Copilot in Excel, and the problem gets even more amplified.
It doesn't have to be that way. Excel is an incredibly powerful data platform and includes a full database engine and Power Query support for accessing data systems. Couple that with a validated, consolidated master data set, and you have a tool that can answer most business data questions, powered by Copilot AI. Say goodbye to CSV exports from systems, manual manipulations, and merging of different datasets. Data security can also be integrated into the models so that the appropriate data is provided only to the right people.
We'll be sharing real examples of how we do resource planning, billing, and project management with the master data for our business.
Stay tuned for details.
Session 5: Power BI Visualizations
Microsoft Power BI lets you visualize your business in ways you may not have thought possible. In this session, we'll take the rich dataset we've created and turn it into a truly interactive experience that lets you ask questions and explore your data as a semantic model. This is a Fabric and Power BI concept that explains the relationships in your data so that you can visualize it in new ways and even ask it questions with AI.
Power BI offers a rich set of visualizations that transform your data into charts, graphs, and more. Slicers let you explore relationships among data elements, making asking questions and exploring your data a truly interactive experience. Copilot for Power BI even lets you build these visualizations through natural language.
Stay tuned for details.
Session 6: SSRS Has Been Dead for Years. Nobody Told Your Business
Power BI transformed analytics, but it left a gap in operational reporting: paginated outputs, search pages, refiners, and deterministic results for line-of-business apps. We'll introduce a new approach we've built: an AI-authored, definition-first operational reporting and search platform that replaces the report designer entirely. Users describe what they want in plain English, and an AI agent translates that intent into a schema-validated definition, which is executed against Azure AI Search and Microsoft Fabric. Results appear as richly formatted pages in the browser, which can then be exported to Excel or PDF for distribution.
Stay tuned for details.
The Thread that Ties it All Together
AI is only as good as the data that supports it. Currently, many businesses lack the necessary data foundation to leverage AI effectively.
Envision IT's Microsoft Fabric Summer Webinar Series aims to address this gap. The series includes six sessions that will guide you step by step in building a solid foundation for data architecture. Topics will cover connecting your SaaS systems, creating a trusted golden record, writing data back to the source, governing your Fabric platform, and making your data usable in Copilot, Power BI, and AI Search.
This is the playbook we use, and now it's yours.
Visit the Envision IT events page to view the complete lineup and register for each session in the Microsoft Fabric Summer Webinar Series.
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