Power BI Crisis Communication Presence Report - What It Does and Whether to Use It

Australian organisations have had a lot of practice at emergencies over the last several years. Bushfires, floods across southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales, cyclones in the north, and a pandemic that sent everyone home overnight. In every one of those events, HR and operations teams had the same basic question: are our people OK, and where are they?

The answer at most organisations was a spreadsheet, a phone tree and a lot of managers sending individual texts. It worked, sort of, but it was slow and nobody had a clear picture until hours later.

Microsoft's Crisis Communication solution was built for that problem, and the Power BI Crisis Communication Presence Report is the reporting piece on top of it. Microsoft documents how to install it in the Crisis Communication Presence Report article. I want to give a more honest assessment of what it is, how it fits together and where it falls short, because we've been asked about it by clients who saw it in a Microsoft demo and wanted to know if they should just switch it on.

What it actually is

First, some context, because the report doesn't make much sense on its own.

Crisis Communication is a Power Apps template app from Microsoft. Staff install it (on mobile or desktop, often inside Teams) and use it to check in with a status during an emergency. Typical options are "working from office", "working from home", "sick", "on leave" and similar. Admins can push news updates, share emergency contacts, and send alerts. Behind the scenes it uses Power Automate flows and stores data in SharePoint lists, with some deployments using Dataverse instead.

The Presence Report is a Power BI template app that connects to that SharePoint data and gives managers a dashboard view. It shows things like:

• how many staff have checked in, and their reported status
• trends in status over time (for example, how many people shifted from office to home across a week)
• breakdowns by location or team, depending on what data you've captured
• who hasn't checked in yet

That last one is the bit people actually care about. During an incident, the list of people who haven't responded is the list someone needs to phone.

Setting it up

The setup itself is fairly quick if the Crisis Communication app is already running. Roughly:

1. Make sure the Crisis Communication Power App is deployed and people are checking in, so the SharePoint lists have data.
2. Install the Crisis Communication Presence Report template app from AppSource into your Power BI tenant.
3. Connect it to your data by entering the SharePoint site URL and the names of the relevant lists.
4. Authenticate with an account (OAuth2) that can read those lists.
5. Set up scheduled refresh so the report stays current.

In practice, step 1 is where the effort goes. The Power App needs deploying, the flows need connecting, the admin settings need configuring, and you need people to actually install and use it. The Power BI piece is maybe 30 minutes of work on top.

A couple of gotchas from experience. The account you authenticate the template app with matters, because if it's a person's account and they leave, the refresh dies. Use a dedicated service account where you can. And the template app expects the list structure the Crisis Communication solution creates. If someone has "helpfully" renamed columns or added required fields in SharePoint, the report will break in confusing ways.

Refresh is the real limitation

Here's my main concern, and it's one you should think hard about before relying on this in a genuine emergency.

The Presence Report is a Power BI import model on top of SharePoint lists. That means the data is only as fresh as the last refresh. With a Pro licence you get up to eight scheduled refreshes a day. With Premium or Fabric capacity you get more. Either way, you're looking at data that might be 30 minutes to a few hours old.

For tracking trends over a week of remote working, that's fine. For the first two hours of a flood evacuation, it's not good enough. In a fast-moving incident, managers need to know right now who hasn't checked in, and a dashboard that says "last refreshed 2 hours ago" can be actively misleading.

Our usual advice is to use the Power BI report for situational awareness and post-incident review, and to give the incident team a direct view of the underlying SharePoint list (or a simple Power App screen) for live, minute-by-minute checking. You can also trigger a refresh on demand when you need it, but someone has to remember to click it, and SharePoint-sourced refreshes aren't instant.

Other things worth being honest about

It's a template, not a product. Microsoft publishes these as starting points. They don't get the same level of ongoing investment as core Power BI features, and template apps in general have been getting less attention from Microsoft over time. If you deploy it, expect to own it, and expect that you may need to customise or rebuild parts of it.

Adoption is everything. The report is useless if 40 percent of staff never installed the app. The organisations that get value from this run regular drills (quarterly is a good rhythm) so people know where the app is and how to check in. If the first time someone opens it is during an actual crisis, response rates will be poor.

Privacy needs a proper look. You're collecting data about where staff are and whether they're sick. In Australia that touches the Privacy Act and, for some organisations, state-based health records legislation. Work out who can see the report, how long the data is kept, and what staff are told about how it's used. Row-level security so managers only see their own teams is a sensible starting point. Don't let this become a general-purpose "who's in the office" tracker without having that conversation openly with staff.

Frontline and non-desk workers. Construction crews, mining sites, field service teams and healthcare workers often don't have reliable Teams access or a corporate phone. If a big part of your workforce is in that group, a Teams-based check-in app won't reach them. SMS-based tools may suit better, and you'd then bring that data into Power BI separately.

When it's a good fit

I think the Crisis Communication solution plus the Presence Report makes sense for organisations that:

• are already heavily invested in Microsoft 365 and Teams
• have mostly office-based or hybrid staff with corporate devices
• want a low-cost starting point rather than buying a dedicated emergency notification platform
• are prepared to run drills and keep the thing maintained

For organisations with large dispersed or frontline workforces, strict real-time requirements, or regulatory obligations around incident reporting, a dedicated critical event management platform is probably the better primary tool. You can still use Power BI for reporting on top of it. In fact that's often the best of both: a purpose-built platform for the live response, and Power BI for the board report afterwards that shows response times and coverage.

Making it better

If you do go with Microsoft's template, a few improvements we've made for clients are worth considering:

• Join the check-in data to your HR system's org structure, so the report shows status by manager, cost centre and site rather than whatever free-text location people typed in.
• Add a "not yet responded" page with phone numbers pulled from the directory, so whoever's running the phone tree has one list to work from.
• Use Power Automate to send follow-up reminders to non-responders automatically after a set time, rather than relying on managers to chase.
• Keep a historical log of each incident so you can compare response rates across drills and real events.

None of these are hard. They just turn a generic template into something that fits how your organisation actually responds to emergencies.

If you're thinking about staff safety reporting, or want help getting more out of Power BI generally, our Power BI consultants can help you work out whether the template is enough or whether you need something more tailored. For the check-in app and automation side, our Power Apps consultants and Power Automate consultants do this kind of work regularly.