Building Access Template and The “Holidays Error”

The Building Access app template for Teams is one of the most successful app templates we created. It is being used by hundreds of customers worldwide to control how employees get authorizations to work onsite during the COVID-19 crisis.

It is a Microsoft Power Platform based app that supports the administration of building occupancy thresholds and social distancing norms by enabling facilities directors to manage, track, and report employee on-site presence.

The app was created using Microsoft Power Apps, and Power Automate, and it is deeply integrated to Microsoft Teams, allowing organizations to determine building readiness, establish eligibility criteria for on-site access, and gather insights for future planning.

We also had over time multiple community forks, like the versions 1.15 and 1.16 that were created from the original version and implement features like workspace selection, floor maps, health attestation questions per building and a lot more.

Building Access Version 2.0, the official Microsoft version, also implements reservation for periods of the day and a new interface that respects fully the Teams best practices on reactive applications.

It doesn’t matter what version you have deployed, the Power BI report file uses a public webservice to create a public holiday table. Unfortunately that public service is not working anymore, and multiple customers are complaining the reports started to throw an error during the update process.

Versions 1.15 or 1.16 (or any other version based originally on v1.0): https://github.com/cristianoag/BuildingAccess/blob/main/BAR%20Report.pbix

Version 2.0: https://github.com/cristianoag/BuildingAccess/blob/main/Building%20Access%20Insights.pbix

Hope this helps!

Cristiano.

Disclaimer – The information contained in this blog post doesn’t represent the official Microsoft guidance or best practices. It is just the view of the author on current alternatives, implementations and workarounds for common issues and/or business needs. Please refer to official Microsoft documentation and evaluate carefully any steps, code or procedures documented herein. The author doesn’t offer any warranty. Use this information at your own risk.