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://github.com/microsoft/workspace-optimizer
- Documentation: Workspace Collaboration Optimizer
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 License assignment options).