Microsoft Outlook integration with ALSO IoT Ground

Create an event directly in your Outlook calendar and book a time slot for the desired action!

Introduction

You can have your IoT solution accelerator set up rather nicely in your workplace or any other area of your choice. Monitoring the environment behaviour in the real time is a key enabler of IoT value demonstration when it comes to the informative dashboards and actionable information. Making a desired area clean, fresh and cosy is essential to help you work on the peak performance.

In this case, we will show you how to monitor the CO2 level in the meeting room by creating an event directly in your Outlook calendar.

Create a new webhook integration in Zapier

Webhooks provide a way for an internet platform to communicate with external APIs. In the case of your IoT Platform, webhooks are a Rule Engine action components that, when triggered, send HTTP requests to a predefined URL.

In our case, this integration with enable you to monitor the CO2 level in the meeting room.

Here are the guidelines how to create an Outlook calendar events:

Create a Zap in the Zapier online service,
Use webhooks as a ‘connector’ between your Ground's data and Zapier,
Get the custom webhook URL to use it within the Rule in your Ground,
Within Do this... step, choose the "Create Event" option within Microsoft Outlook,
Connect your Outlook calendar to the Zapier service,
Customise the event detail by selecting your "Hook" as the Subject, Start and End Date & Time,
Your Zap is now ready to catch the data from the Ground and pass it to the Outlook calendar!

Create a Rule in ALSO IoT Ground

For the other part of the setup process, you have to create a Rule in the ALSO IoT Platform within your Ground, which will create the event in your Outlook calendar.

To do that, follow these steps:

Click on RULES sidebar on the left side in your Ground,
Click on the + NEW RULE button on the top of the page,
Drag one of your Devices into the TRIGGERS block and select the asset (one or more) you want to monitor and do actions with,
Under the "COMPONENTS" , drag the "Webhook" block to the ACTIONS block
1. Next to the "POST" section, paste the Incoming Webhook URL given in the previous configuration process within Zapier Webhooks (something similar as https://hooks.zapier.com/hooks/catch/5681....../)
2. In the "BODY" section, paste the code similar to the one below.
```
{"value1": "CO2 in the meeting room is too HIGH ({insert here the actual state of the device})!"}
```
3. You have to add the actual state of the CO2 sensor after the "value1" line and under the curly brackets by clicking on the "+" button within the BODY section and then choosing the related asset. The code will look similar to the one below:

5. Click on SAVE RULE.

That's it! 👏 Now the warnings from your Ground should create an Outlook event (15 min duration by default) when the Device's asset value exceeds the threshold level(s) once set up in the Rule engine.

Use-case: CO2 monitoring

The image below shows the use-case of the Environmental device within the Workplace+ Solution Accelerator. Environmental device is an advanced indoor climate sensor that measures CO2 levels, temperature, humidity, light intensity, and detects motion.

Using our Rule engine, integration with MS teams made the meeting room monitoring far easier when it comes to notify the responsible staff to take actions upon received data (e.g. to open the window or turn on the air conditioning if the workplace humidity is too low). Also, if using the MS Teams mobile app, these notifications will be immediately received in dedicated channel and thus the meeting room (or any other area) can be prepared better for the incoming meetings.

Get more info about the Workplace+ Solution Accelerator on our official page

Below are the images of my customised calendar event, since it contains the shared Pinboard for anyone who wants to see the meeting room conditions in the real time.

Video Tutorial

We made a significant effort to facilitate your work on our IoT Platform. So, this video tutorial will explain how to properly create the integration between your the Zapier webhooks and your Outlook calendar.