Reinventing the smart workplace with Microsoft

At Pointr, we believe that the workplace should offer a seamless experience to visitors and employees, from the moment you enter the parking lot, all the way to your meeting, or to your desk. More than 60% of workplaces are now embracing a hybrid environment, meaning a smart workplace has never been more important. We’re very excited to be a longstanding partner of Microsoft who shares that vision for building a smart workplace. 

Microsoft, a workplace innovator 

With hybrid work here to stay, Microsoft is already reinventing the employee experience at their own Redmond campus, by leveraging indoor mapping, IoT, and Microsoft MyHub, which provides employees with flexible experiences to help them find offices, supply rooms, or cafés, or to do common tasks like submit time off or book focus rooms.

Microsoft is now on a mission to make great employee experiences available to companies globally. With Microsoft Viva, they bring an employee experience platform within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. They also recently announced the launch of Microsoft Places, a workplace platform designed to optimize the use of physical space. Microsoft Places will show the workspaces others have booked, so someone can book one nearby if they so choose. It will provide office wayfinding and navigation, guidance on commuting time, tools for scheduling travel time, and insights on space usage to save energy and costs. 

Microsoft + Pointr: longstanding partners with a shared workplace vision

Our journey with Microsoft started in 2014 when we joined the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator program in London. We soon went live on the Microsoft Azure marketplace and eventually became a Microsoft IP co-sell partner. 

8 years on, our journey continues as we strive to power the workplace of the future. As Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says, “every organization requires a digital fabric that connects people, places, and processes.”

The vision we share with Microsoft is that digital maps and location services are the foundation to enable great employee experiences in the workplace campus. 

Picture this: as employees arrive at the campus, the parking system directs them to the closest space available that’s most convenient to them. The navigation system shows the way to the closest entrance to the office building depending on the user’s destination. It brings up calendar information and personal preferences to find the closest available desk.

If an employee wants to sit next to a specific person, they’ll be able to meet them wherever they are on the campus by sharing their live location. They will also be able to search any Point of Interest, such as a favorite coffee shop, browse the menu, and order ahead.

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Making this vision a reality with Pointr 

To deploy these connected employee experiences, companies must bring high-performance and high-scale location technology to their campuses. 

The challenge? Great location experiences are hard to solve. Users expect indoor location services to work perfectly as we’re all used to a very good GPS experience. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of sensor data to process to enable this high-performing blue dot experience that people expect. The technology is also not easy to scale as you have to configure it per building, and each building is different. Creating software technology that can work seamlessly in any building is very difficult.

That’s where Pointr comes in. We make location services available for the first time at scale: 

• Scalable creation of digital maps using our AI technology MapScale   
• Instant, accurate blue dot location using our Deep Location technology
• Smooth wayfinding with automated route generation 

Our location services connect indoor/outdoor areas seamlessly and work even in garages / underground car parks where there’s no signal. We have been able to demonstrate the best performance for digital maps, ‘blue dot’ location, and turn-by-turn navigation for our Fortune 500 customers globally. 

Pointr’s technology integrates with Bluetooth sensors that we are deploying in buildings, such as Wi-Fi access points, smart lighting, or Bluetooth beacons. With digital maps and ‘blue dot’ location, users know exactly where they are at any given time and what’s near them. They can search for amenities and facilities and the routing system can guide them to their chosen destination. 

Building on our long-standing partnership with Microsoft

Companies will continue to fine-tune their hybrid workplace, and to do so they will need location technology that evolves with them. With our hardware-agnostic platform and robust integrations, Pointr has the ability to support a wide range of enterprise use cases, both today, and in the future. 

As Microsoft continues its journey as a pioneer in smart workplaces, we want to continue our partnership and work together to enable great visitor and employee experiences globally.