This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.

Our team is excited to announce our feature updates for August 2021. (You can see past blog articles here). This month’s update describes the following features:

• Workspace Collaboration Optimize
• Group-based licensing without Exchange Online

Workspace Collaboration Optimizer

We have released an open-source Azure tool for workspace planning. Facility management professionals and occupancy planners can use it to identify and seat teams together in a workspace in a way that maximizes cross-team productivity and collaboration. They can use this tool to generate seating plans quickly and objectively, in a data-driven way.

When you use this tool, you can have its algorithm apply the following rules and constraints:

• Teams stay together - When a workspace can seat everyone on the team, it will keep them all together.
• Teams who collaborate the most sit together - Based on the collaboration patterns and the distances between spaces, if team A spends most of its time with team B, the two teams are assigned workspaces that are as close together as possible.
• The most central team is in the most central workspace – After prioritizing the first two items in this list, the tool can help you determine which floor plans are better than others for seating specific teams in central locations.
• Everyone gets a seat - All team members get an assigned seat in a workspace.
• People and seat assignments must match - No workspace is assigned more people than it has seats for, and no workspace can have a negative number of people assigned to seats.

To access the tool’s files and documentation, see the following:

• GitHub repository:  https://github.com/microsoft/workspace-optimizer
• Documentation: Workspace Collaboration Optimizer

Group-based licensing without Exchange Online

In response to customer requests, we are excited to announce that Workplace Analytics customers can now enable group-based licensing (GBL) with a single group without requiring Exchange Online (EXO) licenses to be assigned with the Workplace Analytics licenses. In other words, Exchange Online is no longer a prerequisite for Workplace Analytics service plans. For more information about Workplace Analytics licensing, see License assignment options).