Microsoft has introduced a brand new Microsoft 365 app known as Microsoft Locations that may look to “optimize” the administration of hybrid workplaces.
Introducing the app at its Ignite occasion, the corporate defined the concept is to tell crew members when colleagues are coming into the workplace, and counsel whether or not sure conferences could also be greatest held in person.
It additionally teased “clever recap”, a characteristic that may use synthetic intelligence to research assembly recordings with the purpose to assign duties to crew members, take minutes, and share “customized insights”. A clever recap shall be obtainable as a part of the brand-new Groups Premium bundle.
Microsoft Locations and hybrid working
The introduction of Microsoft Locations, so the corporate claims are backed up by survey information. Based on the corporate’s current Work Trend Index over 80% of workers go to the workplace for the sake of assembly and collaborating.
Microsoft believes {that a} software program answer is required to bridge the hole between the pre-pandemic world of bodily current work and the allowance for distant work spurred on by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Locations, it claims, will supply the granular perception of the office, and recommendations on how workplaces may benefit from being reconfigured as corporations adapt to hybrid working environments.
Different options will embrace a “modernized” convention reserving system, in addition to insights for enterprise leaders to evaluate how workplace area is getting used, and methods to greatest method hybrid working coverage.
However, workers who’ve grown snug with video conferencing needn’t despair. Locations, Microsoft claims, are being developed to “[connect] digital and bodily areas”, and to make workplaces safer and extra clear following the onset of the pandemic.
Whereas no less than some allowance for distant working has caught at many workplaces, the transparency into work areas that Microsoft desires to supply with Locations could renew the belief workers have in workplace environments, with a renewed deal with worker security.
However, the dialogue of the device’s long-term influence on working practices must wait. As of proper now, Microsoft Locations is just “coming quickly in preview”.
