Microsoft has introduced a brand new Microsoft 365 app referred to 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 workforce members as to when colleagues are coming into the workplace, and recommend 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 investigate assembly recordings so as to assign duties to workforce members, take minutes, and share “customized insights”. Clever recap might be out there as a part of the brand new Groups Premium bundle.

Microsoft Locations and hybrid working

The introduction of Microsoft Locations, so the corporate claims, is backed up by survey information. Based on the corporate’s latest Work Development Index (opens in new tab), over 80% of staff go to the workplace for the sake of assembly and collaborating with one another.

Microsoft believes {that a} software program resolution 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 provide granular perception into the office, and recommendation on how workplaces may gain advantage 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 house is getting used, and easy methods to greatest method hybrid working coverage.

However staff who’ve grown snug with video conferencing needn’t despair. Locations, Microsoft claims, is being developed to “[connect] digital and bodily areas”, and to make workplaces safer and extra clear following the onset of the pandemic. 

Whereas a minimum of some allowance for distant working has caught at many workplaces, the transparency into workplace areas that Microsoft needs to supply with Locations could renew the belief staff have in workplace environments, with a renewed concentrate on worker security.

However dialogue of the instrument’s long-term influence on working practices must wait. As of proper now, Microsoft Locations is barely “coming quickly in preview”.

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