Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams Insider Podcast. This week we are talking Microsoft Places with Martin Boam from Microsoft. He takes us through what Places is and, and what it isn't, gives us some live demos, and we talk a little bit about how AI and Work IQ plays into the Microsoft Places story. Many thanks to Martin for jumping on the show, and also many thanks to Jabra, who are the sponsor of this show. Really appreciate all their support. On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back. Excited to do this one. This is something Martin presented at the AI Workplace Tour, and I thought it was such a good session that I thought we'd try and get it on a recording. So Martin, welcome back to the show.

Martin Boam: Thank you very much. Cheers, Tom.

Tom Arbuthnot: For, for those that don't know, a new FY now as well give us your current role and what you do.

Martin Boam: I am still an Architect in the Field and Partner Center of Excellence at Microsoft. So focusing on Teams, Microsoft Places, but more and more spending a lot of time in Copilot land and Agents, and more and more Agent 365. So-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Those, those decks that we use so often, the update decks around Teams and Copilot, that's some of your and your team's work, isn't it? That's really useful stuff.

Martin Boam: It is, yeah, yeah. So What's New CMD, What's New Copilots, those two monthly presentations that I build. Helps me learn but yeah, like to share with others.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. Well, thanks. Well, today we're talking Microsoft Places, and you did a good session where you talked through what Microsoft Places is, where the kind of Copilot and AI story works in. And this story's evolved a lot, you know, from launch and over the last year as well. And I guess most critically, Places is now largely included in the core licensing. So that's quite a big change from it being part of Teams Premium, which meant you had to step up a per user license to start taking advantage, advantage. A lot of it now is in the, the core licensing.

Martin Boam: Yeah. There's a huge amount of value within the Enterprise Teams license now. More and more customer feedback was, you know, "Well, why do I need Teams Premium to do Places?" Or, "I only wanna do desk booking," or, "I only wanna do room booking." And when you look at other solutions, it, it's a difficult conversation sometimes to have, so. But not just Places that, that kind of came out of Teams Premium, also some of the, the events capabilities as well. But I've, I've got a slide on that, that we can have a quick talk about.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. So where should we start with Places?

Martin Boam: Places. So I guess Places is part of the AI-powered workplace at Microsoft. We're talking about the AI-powered workplace. So, you know, this is, we say, a holistic solution that allows companies to coordinate productivity, productivity, yeah, productively, modernize intelligently, and optimize proactively as well. And this is across Microsoft Places, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365 Copilot as well. So when you look at the, the coordinate pillar as part of the AI-powered workplace, you know, this is, is, is all about coordinating, bringing people together, s-streamlining the who, the when, and, you know, where employees work, and improving that, you know, coordination and booking across flexible workplaces as well. You know, if I go into an office, you know, I can set a work plan. I want to know who's there. I want to make sure that, you know, there's value in me going into the office. So that coordination I think is, is, is more than ever as we're, you know, more remote than others and return to office policies as well. So, you know, really important to have that. And then the second part is, you know, modernize intelligently. So making these workspaces, whether it's desks, whether it's rooms, you know, bringing in intelligent audio, intelligent video, and leveraging AI, and making sure that, you know, we can find these spaces easily, we can see what's in there, and then, you know, leveraging the power of AI, AI in audio and video, speaker recognition, you know, making sure these places are intelligent as well. And then the last part of that is, you know, optimizing, you know, where work happens, bringing in management, planning insights, adding Copilot

Tom Arbuthnot: On top of that as well. And that, that's more the, that's more the admin and facilities side of the story. So you've kind of got the ease of booking for the user and the using the spaces efficiently in a hybrid way, and then it's like understanding what's going on with the building, with the rooms, who's choosing what and why. We need more of this type or more of that type.

Martin Boam: Yeah. And, you know, increased visibility of all those types of spaces, how they're being used, if they're not being used. And then some t- things like auto-releasing spaces that aren't used, and you can make more kind of data-driven decisions, and manage, you know, more proactively your workplace or your environment or your spaces. But when we look at some of the foundational components, you know, there is a software side of this. You know, Places is where you work. You know, it's in the flow of work, it's in Outlook, it's in your calendar, it's in Teams. There is a dedicated Places app that, that you can go and have a look at, and we'll have a look at in a bit more detail. Also extended into peripherals, so bookable desks and devices, and then into Teams Rooms as well. So you've got, you know, the hardware sensor capabilities of Teams Rooms as well, which I think we'll see more and more where, you know, these Teams Rooms devices have got, you know, sensors and hardware in there to understand the room, the occupancy, and really, you know, bringing that into, into the analytics space as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. This is Microsoft's potential, isn't it? Like, like you've got Exchange, so you've got all the bookings and all the diaries for lots of organizations. If an organization's got Teams Rooms, then that's the intelligence in the room. That's the room system. And then you've got, you know, panels as well. We've got BYOD and desk bookings, which we'll get into and kind of a USB-C type understanding of which desk you're at. So it's kind of bringing all that together to maximize the user experience.

Martin Boam: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And there's, there's, you know, a lot of the device partners and OEMs either have got sensors in their devices or, you know, external s-sensors and capabilities as well to, to integrate into, into Places and into the analytics as well. The other thing that, that, that's really important is Places brings location intelligence into Microsoft Graph. So I think more and more we'll see this, particularly with Work IQ and, and bringing, you know, spatial da- spatial data and l-location context as well. So in terms of spatial data, it's, you know, bringing all your buildings, floors, rooms and desks into that Places directory in a hierarchy. And then, you know, what we say is the location context is, is, is also your workplace presence which is the ability to understand, you know, where your colleagues are and, and let them know where you are as well. And then you make Kind of recently, GA was kind of the location presence using Wi-Fi so you don't have to manually check in.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I'm so glad to have that back. Like we had that back in the, the Lync days way back where like based on subnet we knew where you were automatically and it's, it's got... It's taken all this time to come back into Teams. So, and it's very, very opt-in, like it's opt-in for the admins, it's opt-in for the users. But if you choose to have it can update Teams and say, "Yes, Tom is in the office," down to, you know, on this floor or in this room, depending on how your Wi-Fi is, is laid out.

Martin Boam: Yeah, and then bringing in, bringing this information into like into WorkIQ will bring more ability into Copilot where you, you could ask Copilot, you know, "Who is in the office? Who is near me?" So again, em- empowering sort of Copilot to, to have more context. You know, "What's the best days to go into the office?" You, you could ask and more and more functionality we're bringing into the chat interface and I, I've got a demo of, of, of that as well in terms of scheduling. So if we move on from there, there, there's some location intelligent North Star principles, but, you know, really important to kind of meet the employee where they are to enable this coordination, streamline how people can search and reserve spaces, and, and create that connection and collaboration with workplace presence as well. So these things, you know, really important. I think we've touched on those just as, as we've been discussing there. So we mentioned licensing. So effective April 1st. That, that seems so long ago now, but it really isn't, is it really? But this is where we made some changes is changes to the Teams Premium license. So when we look at Microsoft Places particularly this affects Microsoft Places where some of the end user functionality that, that was tied into Teams Premi. So if you didn't have a Teams Premium license, you, you couldn't use some of these functionality will become available to, we do say most user licenses there, but it's the Teams Enterprise licenses. And there is a asterisk at the bottom of which ones it's included in. But yeah, Places Finder and the Places app available to, to user licenses from April 1st. Yeah. Pretty much

Tom Arbuthnot: An- anybody in business or enterprise is going to have, have this included. The, the, the disclaimers are for the kind of weird edge case licenses, aren't they? This is pretty much in there.

Martin Boam: Yeah. Bringing the, the Places Finder was, you know, bringing that map-based experience, some of the stuff that's, that's really good. We'll have a look. Places Explorer, for example, where you see the maps. So on the second one, pr- kind of bringing the map-based experiences that, that are really where Places really shines is being able to see a map, look at desks, look at rooms making that available as well. So Places unbundled from Teams Premium licensed via a shared space license. So this, this is, is a big one. But in, in terms of desks you couldn't really have Microsoft Places as a focus as a desk booking solution, but customer feedback when Places was released is they'd like to use Microsoft Places as for only desk booking or only rooms or, or both.

Tom Arbuthnot: And so this is where, this is where the licensing works now. So all the user features or most of the user features are in the core license. But if you want to have a de- a desk be bookable or a space be bookable, you're now licensing that room or that desk, and it's four desks to one shared space license, isn't it? So kind of effectively $2 a desk a month, but $8 for a shared space license.

Martin Boam: Yeah. On, on the next slide, if we... We'll jump into... Th- this is a little bit more detail on the shared space license side of it if, if you're interested in particularly in the desk booking. But we used to have the Teams shared device license, but that has been renamed. It's now the shared spaces license. Gives you those four desks or spaces, and adds space management capabilities as well for desk booking, space management, and analytics as well. But a lot more value added into the Teams Enterprise license that most customers already have. So in terms of enabling more people to, to use Microsoft Places and get more value out of it if you've got that existing Teams Enterprise license, which I think was a good move, and a lot of people were, were asking for this.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense, doesn't it? Most organizations have more people than spaces to book, so the, the economic incentive now is aligned well. If you have a lot of desks and you want desk booking by the licenses, or you have a lot of rooms, you'll be covering those with licenses. But otherwise, you get a lot of value out of this included in that core.

Martin Boam: Yeah. So look, I, I mentioned the AI-powered workplace, but when we look at sort of aligning those Places experience into the AI-powered workplace these are some of the things we'll touch on. But from room reservations and signals, we've mentioned those. So intelligent reservations, being able to check in to locations and auto-release rooms, for example. If, if somebody doesn't go into a room or that ro- room's not being used, you can auto-release it and make it available for somebody else to be able to book. 'cause there's a lot of meeting rooms that are booked, but not necessarily always used. And that rolls into the occupancy signals room health. Now we've mentioned desk reservations and hot desking and checking into desks. Analytics, so being able to have sort of Places and Spaces analytics. And management as well. So when Microsoft Places was first released, it was all PowerShell based, but there are dedicated... There is a dedicated admin portal now where you can go and configure Microsoft Places from as well. So if we dive into some of these as we go through, but, you know, as an introduction, you know, Microsoft Places is an integral part of Teams and Outlook and the calendar. Its Places is in the flow of work, for example, of where people are. So I can s-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, this is, this is quite an important point, isn't it? 'Cause it doesn't... Y- you're not necessarily needing to go to a new app or a new experience. Like if you're already booking in Outlook with the new Outlook calendar or in Teams with the new calendaring, you get the Places features coming through to that experience.

Martin Boam: Yeah, and you can, you can set, set a work location. We'll mention what that is in a moment. But yeah, I can go in there. Go into my Outlook calendar. I can see, you know, who's in the office today, where they are. You can hover over sort of contact cards and get presence information. And I can do booking, you know, all within here and show what, you know, Places Finder. I can open up Places Explorer all within Outlook. Same again, I can do that in Teams as well. So, you know, it-- we're not training any new workflows. This is all in the flow of work in Outlook and Teams. So this is one, one core part of, you know, Microsoft Places is, is coordination. So work plan coordination. So within Outlook I can go and set my work plan. I can see- What,

Tom Arbuthnot: What, what is a work plan? How would you explain that one? 'Cause it, it sounds very formal. It sounds like a PM coming up with a big project to me.

Martin Boam: It's kind of reflecting the intention of where I'll work. F-for me, I'm mostly remote, so my weeks are mostly remote, remote, remote, remote. But I, I set my work days with a location, and, and that's my intention of, of, of where I will go and work. I think I can show you that in, in, in the demo in here. But yeah, that, that's what the work plan is kind of setting up my week of where I'll be.

Tom Arbuthnot: So just really you're, you're, you're letting your team know what you intend to do with your week, and that can feed into the knowledge base of- Yeah okay, well now I know that Martin's in on a Wednesday. Potentially I might go in on the Wednesday too, 'cause that's when he's intending to be there.

Martin Boam: Yeah. And then like, like you said, yeah, I can share that intent with others. And you know, I'm planned to be in London, for example, and people can see when I would be in London. I still need to either do a check... You know, when I get there, I need to check in or have the auto check-in capability or plug in to a desk to actually check me in. But yeah, I can share that, those signals with, with other people. Let's move through. So in terms... We'll, we'll start with room booking, but th-this is an example of the Places Finder re-reservation. So I've got a demo of this, but it gives you, you know, enriched room search and reservations. So all within Outlook when I'm scheduling a meeting I can come in here, open Places Finder here. Let me see if I can add a pen and cursor. Ooh. Yeah, all within here. So this is Places Finder on the right or within, you know, scheduling an event in Outlook. You know, I can... If I add images into the directory, I can see images, I can see names. I can also add meta tags in there, so I can quickly see is that room Teams enabled, for example. And you can get sort of little logos, and you can see occupancy. So all of these really easy and quick and, you know, if you have a Co- Microsoft 365 Copilot license as well, you can do some, some Copilot magic in here as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: And that, that's really nice. Just the images and the metadata, like again, if you're gonna do nothing more than just document all your rooms and the, the what's available in them equipment-wise or facilities-wise, that's already a lot of nice additional value for the user, especially when you're booking somewhere you're not super familiar with. Like, oh, I get a vague idea of, okay, that room has two screens, has a Teams room, and it looks, you know, like this. Okay, that, that's the kind of room I'm looking for. Yeah, and

Martin Boam: You can add custom meta tags in there as well for, for other information that might be, you know, relevant for you. But yeah, I mean, first thing I book a room, it... I, I often want to know what's it look like? Yeah. Ju-just to gauge information, but, you know, just as easy as, you know, having a picture in there is, is super helpful. Again, you know, right in the flow of where I was just scheduling a meeting. The next one to look at. Yeah, so, so just on that one, if I go back, that, that feature there. Come on, go back. Yeah, so the Places Finder reser-reservation, this feature added and included, you know, as part of that licensing change on April 1st. You, you can have this within your Teams Enterprise license this is Places Explorer. So this is within the Places app. So this is again in Outlook, so you'll see at the top we're in Outlook, but there's actually a, a Places app in here. This is Places Explorer. I'll show you this more in the demo. But it's a single, single space to see your team, your schedule, you know, easily book spaces. It will say... It will look at my calendar, and it will show on the right here, you know, I have all these meetings. I don't have a room, or I don't have a space. Do you want to reserve a space or a room for, for that meeting? And it's as easy as that. So let's, let's jump in and have a look. So this is a room booking demo. So this was a demo I recorded for the London event. So hopefully... So this is my calendar within here. Yeah. So this is it within Outlook. I can see my work plan location here. I can see that somebody is in the office here as well. This was a Friday, so this is where I was remote. I'm in London. I've quickly updated myself to being in the office, and you can see here I can then search for the office and set a location, which I think should be London Paddington. And if I was in the office, I would be able to do that automatically and check in. For this demo, I wasn't. Here you can see I have a meeting on my calendar that I don't have a room booked for. So here I've come in here that I'll be in London. I have a meeting. Do you want a room? And here I can quickly see some conference rooms available. So within here, we, we don't have a custom image yet uploaded into the London Paddington rooms. But you can see how quick for all my meetings that I have, I can quickly book a room if there's one available. There you can see one that does have a picture in there as well. But I can see occupancy, whether it has audio, video, or it's Teams Rooms enabled, and then I can book those meetings as quickly as that. Just, you know, pretty quick. Usually I'd be searching through with Outlook trying to find spaces.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, just a great big list of names of rooms with no context of like am I accidentally booking like a 30-person boardroom or is this like a

Martin Boam: Four-person? This, this is scheduling a new event. So I'm coming in here, the AI-powered workplace recap. Get rid of that typo. I think I invite Michelle into this one. There you can see the email notification from them rooms I just booked. So here whilst we're in London what am I going to do next? Yeah. So here I'm using the Copilot feature. So if conflicts arise, let Copilot reschedule the meeting, and I can give it acceptable days and times of when if this is not available for Michelle, that, that, that Copilot could auto reschedule this for me. And then I'm gonna add a

Tom Arbuthnot: Room- So that's, that's an, that's an example of a feature that does require the user to have the Copilot license as well.

Martin Boam: Yeah. This is where I've added a room with Copilot, and it's it's added a Copilot managed room in there. Here I can quickly see other rooms if I want to. Here I've jumped in to Places Finder, and you'll see it at the top in here you've got rebook declined rooms. But again, all from this event scheduling experience. I've got Places Finder, and I can find the rooms. If I do have Copilot, Copilot can do some of that work and rescheduling for me if required. And I think I send that one off, and that's added to my calendar there This next part's going into the Places app. So this is Places Explorer within Outlook Here you can see I'm just s- I'm going into the Places app 'cause I think in June in June I was at Redmond. So here I have a number of meetings in... At the 1st of June I'll be in Redmond. So I want to go and search and find a available space in building 3. So here you can see the map experience of Teams. So rooms on the floor, rooms that are available. I can actually see the devices. There's a Logi MeetUp in there, a Teams device, occupancy. I can see a layout of the floor. So even before I've, I've got into building 3 in Redmond, I already have an idea of the floor layout, and obviously I can reserve a space for, for me to use for a meeting there. So this is sort of scheduling meetings in the future in this one.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And that's the Places app experience, but it's, it's an app within Outlook

Martin Boam: Essentially, so pinned. Microsoft Teams, yeah. This... In this demo I'm using it within Outlook.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And

Martin Boam: I think that is that demo. That's that demo done, yeah. So I mentioned check-in. So once you set your work plan and you go to a location, in the first demo I showed that I actually went and checked in that I was in the office, you know, when I was in London. So Places does work with Teams peripherals. So i- in this case, this is a, is a bookable desk. You know, I can book that desk in real time by plugging a peripheral at the shared desk. So this is, I walk up to a space, I can connect, and it's, you know, reserving that space for me. I actually haven't had to do anything.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And there's a map, there's a mapping behind the scenes here of that device is on that desk, therefore, when Martin plugs it in, the Teams client is clever enough to go, "Okay, that maps to that, therefore he's picked up this desk."

Martin Boam: Yeah. So that, that's kind of a, a nice feature of sort of booking desks ad hoc-ly by just plugging into a peripheral. Th- this was the feature we spoke about in terms of automatically updating your work location when connected to Wi-Fi. So this, this has now gone generally available. I th- think it was in the latest What's New Teams blog, and I think maybe mentioned at Infocomm. But th- this is the ability to automatically update your work location based on your corporate Wi-Fi that you're connected to. So from what I understand, th- this is off by default. There is some administration configuration to do to turn this on. And in terms of the, there's some Windows settings as well. There is some on the admin and user side

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. There's a lot of sensitivity around location- Yeah... These days. Funny, funny again, back in the day, we were just doing it for, for Lync on all, all subnets, all Wi-Fi in the, in the enterprise. But yeah, these days it has to be admin enabled, so you have to decide you want to do it. And then even if you decide you want to do it, you can't force the users. The users still have to opt in one by one. Yeah. Which is interesting. I, I would've thought as an enterprise you could say, "Our policy is..." But nope the user has to opt in and say, "Yes, I agree." And at that point then it will auto set their location based on the Wi-Fi.

Martin Boam: Yeah. So I think you can see here that on the contact card... Well in here, you can see that connected to your organization's network or devices, Alpha Building 1. That's-

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah...

Martin Boam: Of course, so that, that is generally available, but does, does have some configuration. There was a great demo day session recently, and I'll give you a link to that at the end where I think the product team Brennan and, and, and the team went through that in a lot more detail. So in terms of desk management, I mentioned the ability to book desks. You can book multiple desk modes, so you can have bookable desks, assigned desks offline or drop-in desks. So the, the desk booking experience, you know, very similar to what I've just shown you in Rooms. So again, you, you can reserve desks within Outlook, within the Places Explorer app as well. You know, we say it's a, you know, a map first experience, really user experience. Supports both individual desks, but also pooled desks as well. So you can see one example here of going through selecting a desk. This is actually booking a desk in the future across multiple days. So if you know you're going to be in the office across the week you can you can plan ahead and book that. Let me just get rid of this. And then finding and booking desks near to colleagues as well. So if you want to sit with or be close to somebody in particular you can go and search for people if you want to, and see neighboring desks, find out where they're planning to sit for a specific day. But each individual reca- retains full control over whether their desk location can be shared with colleagues. So you've got that protection against privacy in there as well. But I think I've got that in a demo that I'll show you. And then multi-desk bookings. So book desks for multiple days at a time. Book desks in shorter increments as well. But I think in the demo, which is, is coming up, you'll, you'll, you'll see that within here. So here you can see that you can reserve a desk straight from Outlook. It suggested a desk Or I can browse for more desks And this is a new desk reservation in that Places Finder experience. So you can see previously used desks. You can have details of the desks as well. This is a desk pool, so you can see that there's 10 of de- 10 of 12 desks available on floor two. And you can actually see, you know, if people have shared their location you can actually see where somebody is sitting. You can actually search for them as well. So I think in a moment we'll go up to the top left to search.

Tom Arbuthnot: And you would just map these out in the same way as you're mapping the rooms out. So you need a, a, a obviously mapping, and then you need to place the desks on the map, and then they become visually available.

Martin Boam: Yeah. So I think here is where, yeah, I'm gonna go search for Matteo So here I can see Matteo is sitting in another area. But quickly I can see the desks around Matteo, and I, I could choose to, to choose and reserve one of those desks instead. But very quickly again, you know, I haven't got-- had to go back and forward with Matteo, "Where are you sitting? What floor are you gonna be on?" You know, I can quickly c-see that as well and then, you know, I can reserve that space as needed.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. And this is again, so shared space license and four desks to every one license. So you'd have to, as many desks as you want bookable, you'd need a license cover for those desks.

Martin Boam: Yeah. So now in this example, I'm reserving for multiple days. Yeah, I think I apply that And they just reserve those desks for me in there Sending reservation. Reservation requested. There we go. And then the other demo I've got is, so we're doing more and more with Copilot Work IQ and the location intelligence piece. So using Copilot and, and this isn't just for Places, but the one demo I've got is an example of where I've used it. But, you know, leveraging Copilot to keep your calendar up to date, for example, manage meetings, rescheduling as conflicts arise, prepare you for meetings, prep for agendas for meetings. So if you do have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you know, you, you-- within the chat experience, for example, and within Outlook, you can do y- you know, a lot more from organizing, scheduling, and collaborating. So the demo I've got is sort of using Copilot, I think within Outlook. You can do this in chat as well. Let me just press this. So here I'm in Outlook. I open Copilot. I think I say find, find me a time to meet with Mario, and book a room in London Paddington. Just let me see if I can Zoom into this bit here. Yeah, so Copilot with WorkIQ knows my contacts. It's got Mario, got Mario's details. It's saw an out of office from Mario. It's also picked up Mario in my team who I collaborate with. I didn't put his surname at all. Let me just come back So the user selected slot one. So I did select a slot there from the scheduling card the room they want to book. Unfortunately, no rooms are available in London Paddington for that time slot, so I, I have some more options. We'll try a different time slot with Mario

Tom Arbuthnot: And this is because we've got now not just the static location information in there, but it's got access to Work IQ, therefore it's got access to current calendar state for those rooms so it can understand this is available, this is not available.

Martin Boam: Yeah. So it did come back. I'm just trying to find the point where it was. Yeah, so there it says, "Great news. Plenty of rooms available at Friday at 25 to 8:00 to 8 o'clock in the evening." So mostly when they're available. "Best fit for a one-to-one meeting is in the Brixton Room, five-person room on floor four with Teams enabled. Nice and cozy for a catch up with Mario. Shall I go ahead and book this?" I'll just say to Copilot, "Yes, book the meeting room." And then Copilot's lining it, lining it up, and there you go. All booked. Here's a summary, title, when, room, invitee and, and it's, and it's done that all within Copilot. Same

Tom Arbuthnot: Thing- Yeah, that's s- that's such a great use case for like a chat-based interface. Like I'd much rather go back and forward on chat to be like, "This is what I'm looking to book. This is the type of room I want." Like off you go, 'cause it saves scrolling and clicking around trying to find stuff.

Martin Boam: Yeah. And like likewise, like if I was already in Copilot Chat and working with Copilot, I could have had that same conversation there. This example, I just, you know, opened Copilot within Outlook. So that's a lot of the user side. This is some of the admin experiences. So this is the kind of Places admin portal. So th- this I can't... This has been available for a few months now. But Places admins have more of a user-friendly interface now to, you know, view the Places directory data, view building floors sections, rooms, desks. You can apply the relative filters in here as well. As you see this example with buildings in Washington, Redmond. I'll see if I can zoom in a little bit. Yeah. But you, you can see here certain filter by country, state, city. You can see your buildings, you can see your floors and sections, and do some filtering down there as well. Previously all PowerShell. There's still PowerShell required for other parts. Yeah. But this gives you a much more visual experience, even if it's to look at the desk types, you know, from drop-ins to bookable desks that are unavailable. You know, you, you've quickly got some an easier to use experience.

Tom Arbuthnot: And again, that's in core licensing. Unless you want things to be bookable, then you're obviously licensing with the spaces, but that UI is available to you.

Martin Boam: Yeah. And similar admin experience for managing desk modes and assignments. Previously all PowerShell based. Now I can look at desks and then, you know, I can change desk mode from being bookable, drop-in, all available, assigned. I can assign them permanently to a person, for example. You know, all within a more GUI experience. Then we've got auto release policy analytics. So within here I can set auto release policies for rooms. So if, if a space or a room is not, is not used or is not checked in within 10 minutes, it can release that room back. So here I can see a request auto release action needed. So if I reserve a space I've had this in the rooms that we use, you know, I get an email, action required. You need to, you know, check in that room. If you do have a Teams Room enabled device or a panel, you know, that can do check-in. But you can set that in an individual space level to, to make sure that any spaces that are not used can be released and made available for somebody else to book and use. 'Cause for example, in the London Paddington office, it's very difficult to find a free space. So this is, is

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Yeah. It's a common-... Very useful... Common ask, isn't it? Like, like we have good intent to have a big meeting. We've booked it, but actually we've just changed to remote and forgot to release the room. So nice, nice to have that option.

Martin Boam: Yeah. I think they call them ghost meetings where like the room's booked, but no one's in there. And then you can see from analytics, you can see the room name, floor capacity, you know, the average reservation average occupancy, and no-shows as well. So again, very useful sort of insights and intelligence that, that, that, that you can get to look at, you know, your spaces. This is some sort of the, the key investments across Places for the next six to nine months. So streamlining and intelligent space reservation, we've touched on those, but aligning more desk and room experiences with Copilot enabling location intelligence experiences, so bringing more of that spatial data and location awareness to the forefront of Copilot, and more enhanced extensibility and management experiences as well. So I think when we, when we delivered this was a few months ago, so some of this is already in flight, some, well, mostly al-al-already delivered, but definitely go and check out the, the roadmap for more. But yeah, a lot more in the extensibility area and management.

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. Well, thanks for taking us through that, Martin. That's so good to get some actual demos of, of how it's coming together. I think the key thing to get across is, again, a lot of this is in the core licensing now, so you can extract some good value out of this just by getting your rooms mapped in, in the, in the calendar and having all that detail and metadata in there. And then if you want to go further into, you know, making things like desk bookings beyond, you know, just rooms, you can add those extra licenses for desk bookings.

Martin Boam: Yeah. I've got some resources if you want to get started to have a look at that. So, yeah, there is some configuration and consi- and design considerations in terms of getting the Places directory correct, so you've got the right buildings and the maps and the floors and the sections. So there is a great Places deployment guide. So Matt Slonker in, in engineering built the Places deployment guide, and it has a, an example deployment, I think for one of the buildings that Microsoft used to have that is no longer there. But we, we used the maps and the locations, and you can get a full sort of deployment step-by-step guide with maps as well. So that's a great resource to download and have a look at as well. And there's a lot of partners for Microsoft Places as well. So some partners can help you with the design, the deployment, also with the mapping. So if you, if you do need some help, there is a Places partner directory as well. There's a few on the top there. But they can help you with discovery, advisory, deployment as well. And some of the other key resources, if you are particularly interested in Places, one thing I would call out is, is the Places office hours. So that's week- weekly on Thursdays. And there is a monthly demo day as well. So if you want to see more demos directly from the engineering team and the product team at Microsoft definitely check, check those out and go to those

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, really good engagement from that product team. They're really keen to answer questions and give feed- and take feedback. So those are some great sessions.

Martin Boam: Yeah, and usually the recordings are available as well to download, and I think they make most of the content available as well. So there's a lot of, a lot of resources available to, to go and help you on your Places journey. I think Yeah. That is everything, so

Tom Arbuthnot: Nice. Well, thanks, though, if you mind. So great, great to see the demos. All boomless. We'll, we'll share all the links on the, on the comments below as well, so if you wanna find any of those resources we'll share all the links as well.

Martin Boam: Yeah. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Glad you enjoyed the session in London. Hopefully that gives you a bit more everyone else some more insights as well.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks, Martin. We'll have you back on the show again soon. But for, for now see you at whenever we next cross paths.

Martin Boam: Yeah. Hopefully soon. See

Tom Arbuthnot: You, mate. Cheers.