Automating Microsoft Places Workflows: ID Auto-Matching and more

Matching the desks and rooms on a floor plan to their Microsoft Places resource IDs has always been the fiddliest part of onboarding. Archilogic made it easier by giving you a visual way to do it: your floor plan on screen, Places resources in a panel beside it, and a click to pair each one. That beat working through a spreadsheet. But the matching was still manual, and on a large floor with hundreds of desks, pairing them one by one took time.

Now we've automated that step. The full onboarding process still involves a few steps, but the most time-consuming part, matching Microsoft Places IDs to Archilogic desks and rooms, now happens in a single pass. Here's how it works, whether or not your floor plan already carries IDs.

When the plan already has IDs: auto-assign

Many floor plans arrive with desk and room numbers already on them, often matching the customer's Microsoft Places naming convention. When that is the case, the Microsoft Places extension does the matching for you.

Open the extension in the Editor, pick your data source (the Microsoft Places API or a CSV export), and click Auto-assign. The extension compares the IDs on your plan with the resources in Places and pairs them, showing a match score for each row. A matching-threshold slider, set to 60% by default, controls how confident a match must be before it is selected. Hover over a row and the matching desk or room highlights on the plan, so you can see exactly which space it refers to. The extension pre-fills the high-confidence matches and flags the uncertain ones for review, so you check those and leave the rest.

From there, you can publish directly to Places.

When the plan has no IDs: create them first

But plenty of plans arrive with no IDs at all: a clean DWG or PDF, rooms and desks all present, but nothing to match against. For those, you create the IDs in Archilogic first using the Custom ID Assignment extension.

It is built for numbering at scale, not one desk at a time. You can draw a path across the plan and have desks numbered sequentially along it, or assign IDs by rows, columns, or snake order. The format is yours to define: an ID prefix and suffix, a starting number, a step value, and the number of digits, so the IDs come out exactly as your convention requires.

Once the plan carries IDs that match your Places naming convention, you're back to the first workflow. Open the Microsoft Places extension, click Auto-assign, and the matches come through in a single pass.

Furniture outlines in Places

There's one more update worth mentioning: how the plan looks once it's in Places.

Microsoft Places draws its own desk icons, using the same simple marker for every desk. We've found a way to include the furniture outlines from your Archilogic plan on the Places map as well. The choice is yours. The Export style setting lets you either publish without furniture outlines, as before, or include the new furniture outlines, making the floor plan easier to read and navigate.

Putting it together

Two paths, the same result. If your floor plan already carries IDs that match your Microsoft Places naming convention, Auto-assign matches them and you're ready to publish. If it doesn't, the Custom ID Assignment extension creates them first, then Auto-assign takes over. Either way, manual room-by-room and desk-by-desk matching is history. Whichever state your floor plan arrives in, the route to a published Places map is now short and repeatable.

If you're planning a Microsoft Places rollout, we'd be glad to help. Get in touch and we'll walk you through it.