Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast This week we are going deep on bookable desks. We have product manager Evie Grimshaw, and she takes us through what bookable desks is, how it works in teams, how it works in places, and how to get it set up in your environment. Many thanks to Evie for jumping on and explaining SE and also many thanks to Pure IP who are the sponsor of this podcast.

Really appreciate their support. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Excited for the conversation this week. There's been a lot of conversations around applicable desks, both from places and from teams, and, uh, I've got Evie to try and help us decode it. Thanks for joining. Evie, you just wanna give us a little bit of a, about your role and your background.

Evie Grimshaw: Yeah. Awesome. Thanks Tom. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here today. So, hi everyone, my name is Evie. I'm a product manager here on Teams Devices. So I work on teams panels, which is the calendar hallway display that sits outside conference rooms. Um, and I also work on Teams book desk, of course, which we're here to talk about today.

A bit among me. Um, I'm actually about two and a half years into Microsoft. I actually interned here, loved the team, and decided to come back full time and have been here ever since. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time and this is a really interesting topic. Like I, I feel like a lot's going on in this space at the moment.

Um, and let's, let's start with that conversation of we've got places and. Book a room and book a desk club and soon book a desk. And we've got teams where we can plug in and auto reserve kind of book a desk. Uh, are we talking about the same thing across those two products? 

Evie Grimshaw: Great question. Definitely top of mind for many people.

So it is one end-to-end integrated solution, 100%. So places, which I'm sure many of the listeners here will have heard about, is a really great product for the return to office and hybrid work journey. It helps you coordinate who else is coming in. It helps you view a floor plan, see where things are if you're not familiar with it helps you book a space in advance.

If you know you're a planner and you know you wanna be sitting in a specific area or booking a specific row. What about once you're physically at the desk and you're, you're in the office and you're plugging in, what happens then? And that is where Bookable Desk comes in to really complete that end-to-end experience and that last mile in the return to office journey.

So we can offer both a better end user experience, like you were just saying about automatic reservations and things like that. And also better admin insights as well to understand how that desk is truly being used. So. Definitely one end-to-end integrate solution. And with both, you can truly have the best desk booking experience.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And when places launched, it wasn't, it was booking desks, but it was really booking clumps isn't the right word, is it? What's the, there was a word from, yeah. Yeah. So, but, but now it's been announced that cumming is down to the individual desk. Is that right? 

Evie Grimshaw: Yeah, exactly right. So we did launch with desk pools or workspaces in exchange, and those had actually been around for, for quite a few years.

But we quickly heard the customer feedback around being able to focus a specific seat was really important. People don't just wanna say, I booked one seat, you know, in this area, but I booked that specific seat, you know, the one by the window, which I really, really want. Um, and for admins as well, being able to.

Understand that granular insight of how each desk is being used is also really important. So the resource accounts and the places experience released back in the fall actually announced at Ignite and coming very soon. All of the Bookable desk features will also be releasing. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And, and, and the kind of, I think to most people, the, I can go into a tool, IE places and book a desk sort of makes sense, but teams bring some kind of secret source to it in terms of if you're plugging into a, a monitor or a USB device on the desk, that's where kind of it gets clever and it can ad hoc.

But can you kind of take us through that story? 

Evie Grimshaw: Yeah, for sure. So, as we were talking about places really is great for planning in advance and figuring out when to come in and all those great things. But you know, if you're, if you're not a planner, if you forgot to book that desk, you know, it was a last minute decision to come into office.

You know, you then have to remember to do that once you're there and then there's a question of, you know, what desk am I at? You know, how do I actually reserve the desk? Right? And you just wanna get your day started. You just wanna start your workday, right? So with just that plugging connection to a peripheral on the desk, such as that monitor or to that docking station, which has the monitor connected teams can automatically reserve the desk for you so that you have to worry about it.

And because it's based on that plugin as well, it's, it's just embedding into that user flow I think. Everyone, probably at least vast majority of people are plugging into a peripheral on that desk to have a better experience in that workday, to have that second screen, for example, when you're Yeah, that's super, super 

Tom Arbuthnot: common these days.

You see the kind of um, USBC driven monitors and that's how you plug in. Like you say you are, you are naturally gonna plug in. 'cause usually you are putting power and you getting the second display. Mm-hmm. So it's a really common scenario. 

Evie Grimshaw: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So we're just embedding into that normal user flow and user habit.

So there's nothing extra or new that a user needs to do to remember to do it, because by just making that connection like normal, we can take it from there in terms of automatically reserving the desk for you. As we just mentioned, also notifying you if you're sitting at a seat that's already been reserved, like if you reserve a desk right ahead of time at 9:00 AM and you're running a few minutes late, no traffic, things happen and I sit down at your desk.

When you come in, you're gonna have to, you know, look at me kind of awkwardly and say, Hey, do I ask Evie to move or should I just, you know, give up and go find a different desk? That's really awkward. And waste your time also. Yeah. So there's that plugging connection. We could actually notify me in this scenario and say, Hey, this, this desk has already taken.

You need to move elsewhere so that when you come in, you know your desk is free. And then even more so we can update work location for you automatically. And on the admin side, we can provide admins and understanding of how those desks are really being used because it's based off of that plug data, which is, you know, the truest signal of desk usage.

Right. So 

Tom Arbuthnot: lots of things. That makes sense. That's awesome. How so how is an admin or as a company do I get from, I've got 50 decks with USBC monitors to teams understanding what that desk is, how's that jump made? 

Evie Grimshaw: Yeah, great question. So first off. This is relying on one, the hardware that you already have.

So there's no hardware you have to deploy or anything like that. It's leveraging the monitors you already have in your in your office. And second, it's reusing the apps you're already using today. So the setup piece and the management piece is all in the teams rooms. Chrome management portal, which I'm for many people out there with teams, room devices already in that portal on a daily basis, right?

And then it's also just leveraging the team's desktop client. So the software is already being used by so many people today. So then in terms of how this can get recognized, it's all based off of the mapping. So there has to be an association of the peripheral, the monitor on that desk to the desk. And that mapping lives in the pro management portal.

So to kind of break it down even further, because it's like cool and mapping, what does that mean? So essentially the first piece is. We need a resource account. So in exchange there are resource accounts, um, such as road resource accounts, which is what teams rooms use it. So sure many people are familiar with that.

But there are actually additional resource accounts which has kind of been living, you know, behind rooms, which are work spaces or desk pool accounts. And then the very recent addition of individual desk resource accounts. So first we need to have those accounts 'cause that represents what's being booked as the backbone of the feature.

But then the next piece is that peripheral. And being able to uniquely identify that peripheral. So there's a few ways that this could happen. We can actually surface a peripheral for the admin automatically. Once we're confident it's an office peripheral, right? And not Tom's monitor at home or anything like that.

Um, but an admin can also collect the information themselves. So we have a script that an admin can run, anyone can run, we'll collect the information for you. You'll make this association between the peripheral and the desk in the management portal, and that will allow the team's desktop client to recognize where the user is when.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. So, so, so one model is I go and proactively do it with a script I plug in, I grab the user, the, the, the device information. That script that you provided pushes up to the pro management portal and magic alignment can be done there. Mm-hmm. And then the other option is, is, is, is it similar or the same as the BYOD discovery?

Essentially, like multiple people are plugged into this device. Therefore I understand it's shared and I, I believe it's aligned to this desk room. 

Evie Grimshaw: Yeah, so that's a great point. That's something that we have coming very soon, which we're really excited about. So what we have live today and, and people would probably see in their admin portal today, is a bunch of peripherals discovered.

And that's because once we've had enough unique users use a peripheral in your tenant, we're confident it's an office peripheral. So we'll surface that for you, but as you just mentioned to, we're also working to take it one step further. Around how can we automatically associate that peripheral for you to the resource account in case you know you have a bunch of desks and you don't have the time to the power shelf script.

Right. And as you were mentioning, it's, it's similar to how BYMD rooms is doing it, where once we've had enough unique users book the desk and then use the same peripheral. We'll make that automatic association for you so that you don't have to worry about, you can remove it, edit it. Of course, you're in full control, but we'll take that first step for you.

So to reduce your manual effort. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And, and again, you said it, but like we're, we're not, there's no new. Hardware or software in the mix here. So you, you've probably already got the dock or device on the monitor. Your users are probably using teams if you're in our world and, and the teams client is doing some clever stuff.

So like the notification you mentioned there about you sat at the right desk or you sat at the wrong desk that's using. Teams as an interface to, to give that message. 

Evie Grimshaw: Yeah. All based in a teams desktop client. So we're automatically reserving you there. We're notifying you the cease taken, we're confirming your reservation that you're in the right spot if you did book in advance.

Um, and as I was mentioning earlier, we can also automatically update your work location for you because a really big question, hybrid work is. Who's in the office today, right? Is Tom in, can I get lunch with him? Right? So work location's really important and people are probably already where in places and outlook in teams.

There's, you can set your work location or plan your work location, but again, plans change. You, you end up coming in on a day you didn't expect to, right? And you have to then remember to go change that. And that's again, more effort for you. So. Adjust that plugin again and with your permission, of course we can automatically update your work location for you so it's accurate and that you don't have to worry about doing anything extra and just get started with your workday 

Tom Arbuthnot: and that that's a feature I love that it services the, the physical location so that you can, you know, look up and say, oh, actually EV's in building two law three and down to the desk if you want to share it.

And you touched on something really important there. Whenever we get talk about location sharing, there's always the, the. Conversation. So how does that work between what the admin chooses that users do and what the users decide to do? 

Evie Grimshaw: Yes, so it's a opt-in feature. So first the tenant has to say, I want this option for my users, for them to be able to have work location automatically updated.

And then they can choose to set it, you know, for the tenant, for a group or for a specific user. And they have full control, just like many other policies that we have. But even after a tenant has done that, the user also has to say they want the automatic updates. So the user also has to opt because as.

We totally understand that work location is very sensitive information, so the user at all times has full control. Even if a tenant has said, I'd like this for my users, the user will be in control of whether they want the automatic updates and also whether they want to share their location because perhaps as well.

I don't want to share down to my specific building. I just wanna share I'm in the office and that's as granular as I wanna get. They have the ability to set that in outlook and control what gets shared out. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I think it's a really important option that it's going down to the user. 'cause some people are super comfortable and I'm quite happy.

Feels no on disco. And other people might not be so comfortable with like, actually I don't want people coming up and finding you and asking that. 

Evie Grimshaw: Exactly. Right. Yeah. Totally makes sense. So yeah, users fully control the entire time. Yep. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. So, and, and, and just to recap on where we are on the kind of journey now.

So right now we've got the, the, the, the desk pumps, but not the individual desks. And we're getting close now to the individual desks coming. Is that right? 

Evie Grimshaw: Yep, very close. So that's coming, you know, just in the next month or so. So really just right around the corner. Um, all of the feature set that we have for desk pools.

So again, reservations, confirmation work, location updates, usage reports in the pro management portal, which is live already for desk pools. So if you have desk pools, go try it out, it's already out there for you. Um, and then we'll also be adding that as well for individual desk booking also. So if you're on that journey with places, if you're evaluating that, we will have all these features available for you as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And the analytics you mentioned there is a really good point that's in, again, it's places and teams. So you might be looking at it from a a places portal point of view or from a team's point of view, but it's the same, same data. 

Evie Grimshaw: Yeah, so that's a great question. So a hundred percent in the sense that both portals are really giving granular insights.

On how your desks are being used. So places analytics is looking at things like your work location. It's looking at badge data, it's looking at occupancy sensors. Again, if you're hooking up all that information and in the pro management portal, we're basing off of that plugin data. So with both portals you'll really get an amazing view of how your desks and buildings are being used.

Um, and in the pro management portal for desks, we can provide admins understanding of. You know, number of reservations, the type of reservations being booked. So are those booked in advance or unplanned? You know, what are my user habits here? And then also reservation occupancy. So you know, you might have tons of reservations and many hours of guest reservations.

How many of those hours are people actually plugged in and using the desk during those hours? Right. It could be a hundred hours, but maybe only 10 hours where people actually, yeah, 

Tom Arbuthnot: people are booking but not showing or 

Evie Grimshaw: that not, or 

Tom Arbuthnot: all the other 

Evie Grimshaw: where then going to a conference room all day. Right. You know?

Yeah. So that can be that insight. Um, again, really based on that true usage of plugin to understand how your desks are being used with reservations as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome ior, thanks for decoding that. It's a really exciting area and it's great to see the teams team and the places team working so closely together to kind of solve this problem of pre-book and ad hoc works really good.

Evie Grimshaw: Exactly. Well, thank you so much, Tom, for having me. Really appreciate it. Again, anyone out there who's looking at places, evaluating places, trying it already, definitely take a look at this solution as well. Again, to really complete that end-to-end experience for death smoking. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks a lot. Thank.