Space Utilization

Empowering real estate and facilities teams with occupancy analytics across buildings, floors, and rooms. This app helps optimize space usage, reduce real estate costs, and plan for hybrid workplace demands.

Use Cases & Value

Get a clear view of how your real estate is being used, from buildings to floors and rooms. With occupancy and people count data from Cisco devices and third-party IoT sensors through the Cisco Spaces IoT Device Marketplace, you’ll have everything you need to understand workspace presence and utilization.

Wireless-Based Occupancy Trends (for Campuses, Buildings, Floors, and Zones)

Capture real-time occupancy data to build up historical utilization data across your portfolio, campuses, buildings, and floors.

Value Delivered : Historical building occupancy for real estate and workplace decision making.

Useful For : Facilities, Real Estate, and Workplace teams

Room-level Utilization Trends

Combine Webex device, IoT Sensor telemetry, and calendar event data for room occupancy metrics, ghost booking rates, and more.

Value Delivered : Room booking and peak people count data combined for workplace decision making.

Useful For : Facilities, Real Estate, and Workplace teams

Step 1: Complete Cisco Spaces Onboarding Process

Configure Cisco Spaces to work with various wireless networks so that Wi-Fi metrics and insights can be gathered.

Customers should have purchased or be in a trial of ACT or Spaces Unlimited Licenses.
Have an account provisioned on the Cisco Spaces platform. If you don’t have an active account, please email spaces@cisco.com.
Create user account – Accept invitation from Cisco Spaces & set up a password.
Onboard wireless network – Connect your network to Cisco Spaces by using our DIY setup guide.

Note: The above process needs to be done only once. It is not repeated for every app. Please ignore if already completed.

Step 2: Wireless Integrated (optional, but ideal for Occupancy Heat Maps)

Define Location Hierarchy,

For occupancy heat maps, wireless integration is needed.
Use the Cisco Spaces Locations & Maps feature to create the Location Hierarchy, manage and merge locations:
- Here are the steps to setup Location Hierarchy using Locations & Maps
If you currently use DNAC / Catalyst Center or Prime and have created maps in those applications, you will want to import those maps into Cisco Spaces:
To import maps from DNAC / Catalyst Center
To Import maps from Prime

Step 3: Platform level setting: Meta Data

Platform level setting
A: Time Zone	Mandatory	Has to be defined at the network level. Computation defaults to GMT if time zone is not set. Impacts ‘time of day’ and daily counts among other metrics.
B: Capacity	Mandatory	Critical for computing % utilization. Normalizing occupancy data for better cross-location comparison. Seating capacity = no. of seats/workstations assigned for a particular floor/building. Has to be defined at network and floor level.
C: Area in SqFt/SqMs	Good to have	Used to compute density. Normalizes occupancy data for better cross-location comparison.

Step 4: App level setting: Right Now and custom WiFi, building floor counts accuracy

Platform level setting
A: SSID filter	Mandatory	Exclude all SSID’s which employees (or students for universities) do not connect to. Recommend excluding Guest SSID’s for two reasons. 1: Guests contribution to occupancy is insignificant in most cases. 2: Guest SSID’s are used by employees to associate their second devices. Guest SSID’s typically do not have dot1x and this results in duplicate counting of people.
B: Custom user-id filter at backend	Mandatory when user-id is not consistent and/or if user names are hashed	Inconsistent user-ids result in duplicate counting. Two distinct devices logged in by the same individual could have two diff user-ids. (eg machine authentication for one kind of device and standard user-name authentication for the second). Backend filtering available on request. (contact support)
C: Customer manufacturer id filter at the backend	Mandatory when non-personal devices are associated with ‘personal’ SSID’s	Non-personal devices tend to inflate people counts. If these devices are not associated with a distinct SSID and cannot be excluded we do offer a customized ‘manufacturer name’ based exclusion.

Step 5: App level setting: Space Manager app Room metrics and Heat maps

Platform level setting
1: Pro Maps Upload	Mandatory for room metric and for heat map feature	Dashboard level setting: Setup > Locations & Maps > Digital maps
2: Associating occupancy sensors to rooms	Mandatory for room metrics	Space Manager
3: Defining default device for each room	Mandatory if rooms have >1 sensor	Space Manager
4. Process CAD Files and generate Digital Maps Pro or Rich Maps with meeting rooms defined
5. Steps for creating Digital Maps Pro or Rich Map	Mandatory when non-personal devices are associated with ‘personal’ SSID’s	https://spaces.cisco.com/setupguide/configure-location-hierarchy/#createrichmaps

Step 6: Webex Integration (for Room Occupancy)

If Webex devices are used to monitor occupancy, these devices must be integrated with Webex Control Hub.

Enable devices in Webex Control Hub to send data such as people count, temperature, air quality, etc. in real-time to Cisco Spaces

Step 6.1: Create Location Hierarchy in Webex Control Hub

Locations and Floors help categorize Workspaces based on their physical addresses. This enables devices to be hierarchically organized for easier management, and later assignment in Cisco Spaces.
Log into Webex Control Hub.
Enter your Control Hub Org email ID to sign in.
In Control Hub, choose Management > Locations.
Create a new location by clicking on Manage Locations > Create Manually. 
Creating locations will make auto-assigning Workspaces on the Spaces platform easier later.
The creating a location window will be displayed to define logical names for your locations. Create a new location by filling in all the required info and pressing Create.
After the location is created, add floors and more levels to the hierarchy by clicking on Add Floors.
Once created, in the Overview tab, you can view the floor assigned to your defined locations.
Assign the location that was just created to the desired workspace/device by choosing Management > Workspace in the Control Hub dashboard.
Choose the desired workspace/device under the Overview tab and click on Assign Location.
Select the location and floor you wish to assign and click Save.

Step 6.2: Enable Environmental Metrics, Occupancy and Presence Detection on your Webex device

To prepare your workspaces to send telemetry to Cisco Spaces, you need to enable the below parameters on device configurations:
- Ambient Noise Estimation
- People Count Out Of Call
- People Presence Detector
On your Day-0 of your IoT Services Activation you’ll see an Amber Banner at the top that signals that you haven’t started your deployment yet.
In the Webex Control Hub dashboard, choose Management > Locations.
To enable environmental and other metrics on your selected device make sure to select your relevant device.
Click on All configuration.
Scroll down for Room Analytics and enable the required features.
Ambient noise is the natural acoustics of the location where the technology is, to enable make sure the toggle is switched to On. 
Click on Next > Apply.
For People Count Out Of Call  make sure the toggle is switched to On. Click on Next > Apply.
For People Presence Detector  make sure the toggle is switched to On. Click on Next > Apply.
Once Room Analytics parameters are enabled, all relevant info will be displayed in the Workspaces > Overview tab for that device, and on Rich Maps in the Cisco Spaces platform.

Step 6.3: Webex Control Hub Activation

a. Deploy IoT Services across ALL active devices

This integration allows telemetry from selected Webex Workspaces to be sent directly from Control Hub to your Cisco Spaces account.
In the Control Hub dashboard, choose Management > Workspaces.
Click the Integrations tab.
On the Cisco Spaces app tile, click Details.
The Cisco Smart Workspaces app integration details window is displayed.
At the top-right corner of the window, click Activate. (Note: You must be a full admin to see the button)
Review the API permissions requested and check the Terms and Conditions check box.
Click Activate.
Once Activated a token  is generated that can be used to enable a cloud-to-cloud integration between Webex Control Hub and Cisco Spaces. (Note: The token expires after 24 hours)
Use the Copy to Clipboard  option to copy the activation code and paste the code in Cisco Spaces to integrate Cisco Webex.
Follow the next steps to paste the token in Cisco Spaces.

Step 6.4: Import Webex Locations

Log into Cisco Spaces.
In the Cisco Spaces dashboard, choose Setup > Locations & Maps.
Click on Import Locations.
Select the option Import Locations. from Webex and click Next.
In the Enter the activation token field, paste the Webex Control Hub token that was copied/generated from Step 3.3 above.
Click Activate A success message will be displayed if your token has not expired.

Note: The “green” activated state will only show for the Cisco Spaces admin that pasted the token in the field.