September 2020

Introduction to Cisco Spaces

Cisco Spaces is a powerful location services platform that leverages existing wireless and/or IoT (BLE) infrastructure to provide actionable insights and drive business outcomes through spaces built-in applications.

Insights from Cisco Spaces include:

  • Location Analytics provides the capability to slice and dice location data by time or location and get a deeper visibility into behavior of people that are connected to your network.

  • Right Now Reports provide real-time count of the number of visitors (identified by devices connected to WiFi) within your physical space and how it compares to the historical average. Based on the authentication method in use, Right Now reports can detect multiple devices belonging to a person and count them as one visitor.

  • Business Insights gives the capability to measure how frequently people visit your physical location and how much time do they spend at your business locations. This data is benchmarked monthly across all locations. It also provides the capability to compare and benchmark the performance of your locations historically, by group or by industry.

  • Impact Analysis provides the capability to measure the impact of at-location events, campaigns and layout changes on behaviour. It is easy to create an Event using the tool and measure the impact of this event based on specific timeline such as Before, After and During the impact on time spent and frequency.

Cisco Spacesapplications include customer experience management apps such as Captive Portals, Location Personas, and Engagemens that allows you to connect with your customers in real time when they are at your physical location. Additional applications also include an Asset Tracking app, a service manager to manage and configure IoT Services (Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)) as well as an open API framework in case you would like to extract this data and correlate it or integrate it into other enterprise systems.

Cisco Spaces provides a single dashboard interface to avail these multiple services through various location based technologies and intelligence. Cisco Spaces enables you to connect and engage with visitors at your physical business locations. It covers various verticals of business such as work spaces, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, healthcare, education, financial services, and so on. The asset tracking application in Cisco Spaces provides solutions for monitoring and managing assets in your premises. Cisco Spaces offers a variety of toolkits, apps and APIs to turn these insights into actions.

Cisco Spaces through its partner program, offers businesses access to various different partner applications across verticals.

Cisco Spaces is compatible across Cisco Catalyst, Cisco AireOS and Cisco Meraki infrastructure.

In addition to the above services, the scope of Cisco Spaces apps have been extended to meet the business requirements that arise due to the global pandemic, COVID 19. Extensions have been built on existing applications and newer applications have been added to meet specific requirements for COVID 19. Extensions to apps such as Impact Analytics, Location analytics, Behaviour Metrics, and Right Now, allow you to analyse the impact of COVID 19 at your business locations as well as take appropriate actions. For example you can now create a rule based on device density at your location such that you will be automatically notified if the number of people at your location exceeds a specific count or density (people/area). The Location Analytics app now has the capability to share executive summary reports with your colleagues in the organization. Additionally, COVID-19 based trend analysis for individual/group locations can now be done using the Behaviour Metrics app, and you can compare specific business locations with that of the overall organisation as well as specific industry vertical.

The Proximity Reporting App in Cisco Spaces provides a quick way to review the location history as well as device proximity history of any impacted device. One needs to just enter the user ID or MAC address, and a report for the device location in the building for the last 14 days along with the proximity of other devices is generated. This report can be exported or shared using the share feature. Similarly the Detect and Locate app now has the capability to cluster devices into specific counts to check and report on areas that may be violating social distancing guidelines.

The following are the major features of this release:

  • New app IOT Device Marketplace to learn about devices tailored to your industry and use cases and order them.

  • Enhanced the Right Now app to display Density Rule reports.

  • Restricted the Partner app activation for accounts with the SEE license.

  • Role-based access for the Location Analytics app.

  • Provision to show sample report for Camera Metrics.

New Features - September 2020

Cisco Spaces Dashboard

The following new features are added to the Cisco Spaces dashboard:

IOT Device Marketplace

A new app IOT Device Marketplace is now available in the Cisco Spaces dashboard. This app will be available only for the ACT license users. For the SEE and EXTEND accounts, the IOT Device Marketplace tile will be shown in the disabled mode.

The IOT Device Marketplace app enables you to learn about devices tailored to your industry and use cases and order them.

When you click the IOT Device Marketplace tile on the home page, you will be redirected to the IOT Device Marketplace(IDM) website from where you can order the devices.

The IOT Device Marketplace (IDM) website login page enables you to login using Cisco Spaces account or Linked In account. If you are logging in using the Sign In with Cisco Spaces option, you have to provide your login credentials and customer name once again for now. You can proceed further to select your industry and the usecase, and can view the IoT devices available for the selected use case. You can then view the device details and can request a quote. Once the quote request is submitted, it will be redirected to the respective vendor along with your contact details. The remaining purchase procedures will be directly between you and the vendor where there will be no involvement of Cisco Spaces.

Density Rule Report

Cisco Spaces now enables you to view the Density Rule report for each Density Rule. In the Right Now app, when you click a Density Rule name in the Density Rule window, the report for that rule is displayed.

The Density Rule report will have the following details:

  • Rule Summary: Displays the total number of times the notification is triggered for the particular rule along with the top three locations with highest number of notifications.

  • Recent Activity: Lists all the activities occurred for the particular rule with details such as location, time, count of people, and result. The recent activities will be listed at the top.

  • Trigger History: Shows the notification details for each day of particular month in a calendar. By default, it will show the month for which the notifications are triggered recently along with the cumulative notification count. Also, the notifications for various location types (Campus, Building, Floor, Zone) for each date are shown in the calendar. When you click on a date in the calendar, the notification details such as location, time, count of people and result is shown for that particular day.

Enhancements - September 2020

Cisco Spaces Dashboard

The following changes are made to the Cisco Spaces dashboard:

Get Partner Apps

In Get Partner Apps, app activation is now restricted for SEE license accounts. However, these account users can view the apps in App Centre. When a SEE license account user clicks Activate App for an app, the error message “Your license does not have access to App Activation.” is displayed. Previously, app activation was enabled for all license types.

RBAC-Location Analytics

For the Location Analytics app, role-based access is implemented now so that you can restrict its access to your users. For the Dashboard Admin role, access to Location Analytics is provided by default. For other roles, you must assign the access separately using the Admin Management option. However, you can assign Location Analytics to a role only along with the DNASpaces service. For example, you can create a role with read and write access to Location Analytics and Read Only access to DNASpaces. The Location Analytics tile will be disabled for Cisco Spaces user accounts that do not have access to Location Analytics.


Note


The existing accounts with Dashboard Admin, Dashboard Read, and Dashboard Read & Write roles will continue to have access to Location Analytics as earlier.


To support this enhancement, a new option LocationAnalytics is now available under APPS in Admin Management> Roles> Create New Role.

Camera Metrics

For Camera Metrics, the following changes are made:

  • For Cisco Spaces user accounts that have not yet configured Meraki Camera or have no data for Meraki Camera, a sample report will be shown.

  • For Cisco Spaces user accounts that have not yet configured Meraki Camera, a notice "Looks like you haven't setup your Meraki Camera" is shown along with a Setup Guide link to navigate to the Meraki Camera configuration window.

Cisco Spaces Runtime

The following changes are made to the Cisco Spacess runtime:

Enhancements for Enterprise Captive Portal

Cisco Spaces now provides the following support for the Enterprise Captive Portals.

  • Support to send notifications to an API endpoint using Trigger API.

  • Support to tag the Captive Portal Users based on their actions.

Issues

Issues describe unexpected behavior in the Cisco Spaces application. The Resolved Issues and Open Issues sections list the issues in this release.

The following information is provided for each issue:

  • Identifier: Each issue is assigned a unique identifier (ID) with a pattern of CSCxxNNNNN, where x is any letter (a-z) and N is any number (0-9). These IDs are frequently referenced in Cisco documentation, such as Security Advisories, Field Notices, and other Cisco support documents. Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) engineers or other Cisco staff can also provide you with the ID for a specific issue.

  • Description: A description of what is observed when the issue occurs.

This section contains the following topics:

Cisco Bug Search Tool

Cisco Bug Search Tool (BST) is a gateway to the Cisco bug-tracking system, which maintains a comprehensive list of defects and vulnerabilities in Cisco products and software. The BST provides you with detailed defect information about your products and software.

Open Bugs

Table 1. Open Bugs
Caveat Identifier Caveat Description

CSCvq83680

RBAC - Admin users who have access only to specific locations are not able to login to dashboard.

CSCvt29202

By default Visitor and Visits counts are displayed for newly created account in Digitization Stats.

CSCvs79627

Meraki camera - User is able to import non camera devices as well.

CSCvu46143

Proper error message should be displayed when trying to use the already accepted invitation.

CSCvt93539

In the Right Now -Visits by floor section, Floor names are not shown in tooltip text, when count of visits is low.

CSCvv22691

When activating deactivated users,'My Profile' information is not getting saved for the first time.

Fixed Bugs

Table 2. Fixed Bugs
Caveat Identifier Caveat Description

There are no fixed bugs for this release.