Our team is excited to announce our feature updates for August 2021. (You can see past blog articles here). This month’s update describes the following features:

• Workspace Collaboration Optimize
• Group-based licensing without Exchange Online

Workspace Collaboration Optimizer

We have released an open-source Azure tool for workspace planning. Facility management professionals and occupancy planners can use it to identify and seat teams together in a workspace in a way that maximizes cross-team productivity and collaboration. They can use this tool to generate seating plans quickly and objectively, in a data-driven way.

When you use this tool, you can have its algorithm apply the following rules and constraints:

• Teams stay together - When a workspace can seat everyone on the team, it will keep them all together.
• Teams who collaborate the most sit together - Based on the collaboration patterns and the distances between spaces, if team A spends most of its time with team B, the two teams are assigned workspaces that are as close together as possible.
• The most central team is in the most central workspace – After prioritizing the first two items in this list, the tool can help you determine which floor plans are better than others for seating specific teams in central locations.
• Everyone gets a seat - All team members get an assigned seat in a workspace.
• People and seat assignments must match - No workspace is assigned more people than it has seats for, and no workspace can have a negative number of people assigned to seats.

To access the tool’s files and documentation, see the following:

• GitHub repository:  https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fmicrosoft%2Fworkspace-optimizer&data=04%7C01%7Cv-pausch%40microsoft.com%7C7af66bcc2e0c47201fbe08d952e917f9%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637631983352381150%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=HWpBUOvSMgye%2FgcEJ6DWMmn%2FDSKeZUeJfjcOovPuMcU%3D&reserved=0
• Documentation: https://nam06.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.microsoft.com%2Fen-us%2Fworkplace-analytics%2Fuse%2Fwsplan&data=04%7C01%7Cv-pausch%40microsoft.com%7C7af66bcc2e0c47201fbe08d952e917f9%7C72f988bf86f141af91ab2d7cd011db47%7C1%7C0%7C637631983352381150%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=8hZ9jkqp5dwjQNwKr8bKA53jx55Wi4h9ktp2FKAkbDI%3D&reserved=0

Group-based licensing without Exchange Online

In response to customer requests, we are excited to announce that Workplace Analytics customers can now enable group-based licensing (GBL) with a single group without requiring Exchange Online (EXO) licenses to be assigned with the Workplace Analytics licenses. In other words, Exchange Online is no longer a prerequisite for Workplace Analytics service plans. For more information about Workplace Analytics licensing, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/workplace-analytics/setup/assign-licenses-to-population#license-assignment-options).  

This blog was originally published on August 04 2021 by Paul Schafer on the Microsoft Tech Community.