Transform Your Space Into a Smart Space with Cisco Spaces [Beginner's Guide]
As a business owner or manager, you’re always looking for ways to create a trusted workplace, improve productivity, and optimize operational efficiency, all from one place while reducing your operational costs.
You need access to real-time data moving in and out of your premises to achieve this.
Fortunately, every phone, camera, laptop, and IoT device connected to your network provides real-time insights. You can leverage this data to make your business safer, your building smarter, and your wireless connectivity more seamless.
Enters Cisco Spaces, a cloud-based location services platform.
Let’s discover Cisco Spaces and how you can use this platform to create a productive, efficient, and enjoyable workplace.
What is Cisco Spaces - A Brief Introduction
Cisco Spaces (formerly Cisco DNA Spaces) is the highest-ranked indoor location-aware and IoT cloud platform that turns ordinary physical spaces into smart spaces. It provides 24/7 centralized visibility, control, and monitoring of people and objects within your premises via its single web-based dashboard.
Using Cisco Spaces, you can:
- Locate available meeting rooms.
- Track indoor environmental conditions.
- Monitor and share occupancy levels in real-time staff and visitors.
- Enable multiple apps, devices, and use cases from the dashboard.
- Securely connect users to your network and offer personalized IT experiences.
- Integrate with your existing Cisco platforms, third-party IoT sensors, and multivendor apps for smart and sustainable operations.
Getting Started with Cisco Spaces
Configuring Cisco Spaces might seem complex in the beginning, but with a step-by-step process, you can easily get started with this valuable tool:
Step 1: Familiarize yourself with the platform.
Create and link your Cisco Spaces account to your existing Cisco Wi-Fi infrastructure. Then, explore the dashboard that showcases all key analytics, reports, and tools available to you.
Step 2: Quick implementation
Cisco Spaces provides a variety of pre-built templates for different use cases. You can select a suitable template to quickly implement the provided solutions according to your use cases.
Step 3: Enable location analytics
Track visitor behavior metrics, from an average number of visits to time spent in a particular area and the busiest hours of the day and days of the week. Accordingly, you make data-driven staffing and resourcing decisions that further help optimize your business operations.
Step 4: Integrate engagement apps
Send contextual and personalized messages to your visitors via SMS, email, collaboration apps, and push notifications based on their behavioral patterns. You can also send real-time updates to your staff and teams through API triggers facilitated by Cisco Spaces engagement apps.
Step 5: Environmental analytics app
Optimize your building’s performance by leveraging indoor environment insights and metrics, such as carbon dioxide levels, total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs), temperature, humidity, and ambient noise. This data is derived from sensors integrated into your building’s networking and collaboration infrastructure. Accordingly, you can take the necessary steps to ensure optimal indoor conditions within your facilities.
Step 6: Proximity Reporting App
The app assists in contact tracing by showing which physical spaces a person is in based on the devices they carry and other devices in the same space. The app also shows a list of persons in the same location and a timeline of when the affected person entered and exited the location.
As you become more familiar with Cisco Spaces, you can start exploring the platform’s advanced features, such as contactless experiences, real-time space utilization, Cisco Spaces SDK, and many more.
On our blog, you will find resources, including tutorials, step-by-step guides, best practices, and more information, to help you leverage the full potential of Cisco Spaces. Subscribe to our blog so you never miss anything essential for creating a smart, safe, and efficient work environment. Stay tuned!