Microsoft Places now in Public Preview

Microsoft have finally (after a long wait), released the much-anticipated Microsoft Places into Public Preview. When it launches later in 2024, Places will be licensed as part of Microsoft Teams Premium.

What is Microsoft Places?

Microsoft Places, is Microsoft’s “AI-powered” (of course it is), connected workplace app that has been “designed to revitalise flexible work by helping employees coordinate where they work, modernise in-person connections, and provide valuable data for IT, Real Estate and Facilities Management to optimise the workplace.

Microsoft Places Promo (2024)

What’s included in the Places Public Preview

At launch of the public preview, not all features will be available, but more features will roll over time based on feedback on those in the private preview and MVPs. The following is included initially.

  • Location Plan: Allows people to share their proposed location schedule and see who else will be attending in-person – this makes in-person huddles, team lunches and “working together” easier.
  • In-Person Meeting: Sounds like an odd one, but provides updates to meeting invites and calendaring to communicate the organisers “intention” for people to work together with an in-person meeting invite (no Online Meeting) – this is good for team meetings, workshops etc.
  • New Hybrid RSVP: Intended to help us plan better – this shows a collated view of who is coming into the office, allowing people to adjust their location plan directly from their Calendar.
  • Expanded Presence: Provides the ability for people to easily add their location to your presence state, indicating when they are in the office, working at home or from another specific location.

What won’t be available in the preview?

As discussed above, there are some features that Microsoft spoke about when they first announced Places back in 2022. These include:

  • Access to the Places Directory: This will not be available yet as part of the public preview
  • As such the following sub-services that this enables will also not be available including
    • Space Analytics and occupancy data
    • Ability to find rooms by buildings in the Places Finder
    • Ability mention @nearby in Teams

Microsoft have also said that the integration of Places data into Microsoft Copilot will make coordination even easier. Coming in the second half of 2024, you will be able to use Copilot to understand which days are best to come into the office.

To me, personally, we will be playing with this in a demo environment as many of the key benefits I see are in the Places Directory.

Keep an eye on the Places Space to keep up-to-date with updates and changes as the public preview progresses.

Integration with Building and FM Providers

Microsoft are partnering with a wealth of FM and building companies across this market. With Microsoft Places, they have built a ecosystem of partners (listed below) who will build on top of the Places platform with new and existing solutions, leveraging, and enhancing data related to people, location, and space. Microsoft have listed the following launch partners but have said that more are coming rapidly.

  • Avanade
  • AppSpace
  • AVI/SPL
  • CBRE
  • Cisco Spaces
  • Chestron
  • Eptura
  • ISS
  • JLL
  • Service Now
  • Verge Sense

I’m super excited by the integration into App Space and Cisco Spaces 🙂


How do I get on the Microsoft Places Public Preview?

The Microsoft Places public preview is available on request and IT need to sign up using the link below. You can register your primary “live” environment or demo/dev environment (we did both). To sign up follow this link here:

Microsoft may have a solution to solve the Hybrid Hangover

The cost of real estate for business is the second largest recurring cost item (first is people) and can often be more than 20% of annual costs. Since even before the pandemic, though fueled hugely because of hybrid work practices, organisations are looking for ways to be smarter with this space and better understand, plan, and manage these expensive costs.

As we talk about ways to optimise cost within an organisation, we often think about cost optimisation with regards to cloud spend, consolidating vendors, smarter hiring and moving more power hungry, space consuming data centres to cloud.

Announced at this year’s Microsoft Ignite Conference, Microsoft Places could be the redeeming feature large organisations need to help optimise their office real estate both now and for years to come.

What is Microsoft Places?

Hybrid work promises us the best of all worlds. The ease and comfort of working from home, the connection and energy of engaging with our coworkers in the office, and the flexibility and opportunity of working where we want. But today, there are still challenges preventing this promise from becoming a reality.

Microsoft Places is a new (coming in 2023) connected workplace platform that promises to deliver on the promise of blending the best of hybrid and in-person work. Microsoft places is a new platform (yes, platform not product), that will deliver solutions that help organisations coordinate where work happens, modernise the office with intelligent technology, and optimise the workplace for the continuing ever-changing needs.

Microsoft Places – Video: Microsoft

I said before, Microsoft Places is not a product – it’s a suite of products and services which will slowly embed themselves across the wider Microsoft 365 services like Team and Outlook which is where people spend their time. In short this is all about making the office space are more responsive to everyone’s needs.

Image: (c) Microsoft

Microsoft Places, aims to intelligently leverage signals, data and building systems to provide a truly connected workspace experience, bringing the best employee experience, through a single, unified platform which builds upon the building and technology infrastructure to create an environment which can adapt to serve the unique and changing needs of hybrid work and allows leaders and facilities management to better plan and manage their real estate.

The key services will include:

  • Hybrid scheduling – which will leverage common data signals from Outlook and Teams to allow employees to view their week(s) ahead and see when co-workers and others you need to work or collaborate with are planning to be in the office.
  • Intelligent booking for meetings – will help employees discover available spaces with the right technology to match your meeting purpose and mix of in-person or remote participants. This will also feature recommendations for the shortest commute times, along with prompts that provide guidance on when to leave the office for next meeting and ensuring you don’t get booked back-to-back when you have in person meetings to travel to.
  • Wayfinding – will help employees quickly find the right meeting room, which is key for larger organisations with many locations, buildings, and rooms. Employees will be able to see live interactive maps from their mobile device that guides them to the to the right location.
  • Hot desk booking – will mean that employees can see choose where to sit and reserve desks or rooms accordingly. Updates to Microsoft Teams Rooms will bring more inclusive features for hybrid meetings such as auto-framing, content capture and more.
  • Meet-ups – will allow employees to easily create impromptu meetups and share with others in the office.
Mock-up of Microsoft Places – Image (c) Microsoft

Insights and Data for Leaders

Since all this will leverage the wider Microsoft 365 suite and power of the Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Places will provide a plethora of data driven insights such as utilisation data, energy-saving opportunities, and occupancy trends to better manage the physical space.

This data will help leaders and facilities management make any necessary dynamic space adjustments on a particular day or week such as changing excess huddle rooms to overbooked collaboration rooms or converting meeting rooms into more hot desking areas.

Microsoft Places – Image (c) Microsoft

This data will provide not only trends and usage data but will also allow organisations to better prepare, plan and optimise the real estate they have available and how it’s used to maximum potential. This may include reducing available floors on lighter foot fall days – saving energy expenditures and improving the workplace experience for everyone as well as working with managers and team leaders to better understand office trends around people, and spaces and places across their entire portfolio, creating more flexible, dynamic, and sustainable places that support new ways of working.

Working with Connected Spaces Partners

Since the building fabric, sensors and existing management platforms are critical to the success of a modern intelligent building, Microsoft have partnered with many industry and technology partners. This ecosystem of partners will build on top of the Microsoft Places platform with new and existing solutions, leveraging, and enhancing the rich data of the Microsoft Graph.

The list of partners (which will grow closer to release) include.

  • Accenture
  • Appspace
  • CBRE
  • Cisco (coming soon with DNA Spaces)
  • Conseco
  • EY
  • Honeywell
  • Johnson Controls
  • Swift Connect and
  • Many more

Availability

Microsoft say that Places will enter preview in early 2023 with general availability later next year. Microsoft will release more information on this over the next couple of months.