Cisco Spaces is a powerful location services platform that leverages the existing wireless as well as Internet of Things (IoT) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) infrastructure to provide actionable insights and drive business outcomes through built-in applications in Cisco Spaces.

These insights include:

• Location Analytics: Provides the capability to slice and dice location data by time or location and get a deeper visibility into the behavior of users who are connected to your network.

• Right Now: Reports that provide a real-time count of the number of visitors (identified by devices connected to Wi-Fi) 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 single user and count them as belonging to one visitor.

• Business Insights: Provides the capability to measure how frequently people visit your physical location, and how much time they spend at these locations. This data is benchmarked monthly across all the 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 the behavior of users who are connected to your network. It is easy to create an Event using the Cisco Spaces application and measure its impact based on the following:

  • The time spent

  • The frequency during specific timelines such as Before, After, and During its occurence

Cisco Spaces applications include customer experience management apps such as Captive Portals, Location Personas, and Engagements that allow 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 (BLE), if any, as well as an open API framework for extracting this data and correlating or integrating 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 also enables you to connect and engage with visitors at your physical business locations. It finds applications in various industries 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 the assets in your premises. Cisco Spaces offers a variety of toolkits, apps, and APIs to turn these insights into actions.

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

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

In addition to the services specified, 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, Behavior 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 the device density at your location and be automatically notified if the number of people at your location exceed a specific count or density (people per area). The Location Analytics app also has the capability to share executive summary reports with your colleagues in the organization. Additionally, COVID-19-based trend analysis for individual or group locations can now be done using the Behavior Metrics app. This enables the comparison of specific business locations with that of the overall organization as well as with your specific industry.

The Proximity Reporting app in Cisco Spaces provides a quick way to review the location history as well as device proximity history of an impacted device. Based on the user ID or MAC address, a report for the device location in the building for the last 14 days is generated along with the proximity of other devices. This report can also 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.

For additional information about Cisco Spaces, including setup and configuration, see the Cisco Spaces Configuration Guide.

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: