The City of Barcelona wanted to make it easy for mobile workers to find “third places” in the city—that is, suitable places to work with wireless connectivity, quiet environments, and resources such as printers. To achieve its goal, the city launched a web-based portal recommended by the Microsoft Innovation Center for Productivity that helps mobile professionals find the highest-rated coffee shops, hotels, and other places to work depending on their specific location and needs.
Business Needs
The City of Barcelona, the second largest city in Spain, serves more than 1.6 million inhabitants. About half of these people are employed in and around Barcelona, with many working remotely at least some of the time, such as in between meetings and while on-the-go. In addition, the city draws about 6.5 million visitors each year. Thousands of these visitors are business people who come to Barcelona to attend professional conferences, in part, because of the city’s reputation for IT excellence.
With the dual goal of helping businesses be more productive and drawing more visitors to the city, Barcelona city officials and the Microsoft Innovation Center for Productivity (MIC Productivity) decided to launch a portal aimed at helping mobile workers find ideal locations to work no matter where they are in the city. The portal—to be called “Third Place” (www.findthirdplace.com) in reference to a third place of work after the office and home—would offer helpful information about remote work locations, such as the noise environment and the availability of tables, computer outlets, meeting rooms, and printers. The goal for this portal was to be able to enter feedback about various workspaces, such as coffee shops, hotels, airports, and public facilities. In addition, this portal would provide applications that could be downloaded to mobile devices, articles about telecommuting, and tips for those entering this new way of working.
To showcase its IT excellence, the City of Barcelona wanted to have the portal in place by February 2010, when it was to host the Mobile World Congress. However, the portal would need to be launched quickly as the convention was just eight weeks away. “It was important to us to have the service available before our city would be visited by a huge number of professionals who have mobility as a main priority,” says Francisco Rodriguez, Director of Telecommunications for the City of Barcelona.
Solution
MIC Productivity, experts in helping businesses and public administrators increase productivity, helped the City of Barcelona by implementing the portal and adding data about places to work around the city.
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Launching this service in the cloud has enabled us to position the City of Barcelona as a strategic meeting point in Europe. |
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Francisco Rodriguez
Director of Telecommunications, City of Barcelona |
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MIC Productivity built the portal on the
Windows Azure platform and hosted within Microsoft data centers. It also used the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Premium development system and Windows Azure Tools for
Microsoft Visual Studio to create a cloud-based web portal that could easily scale. Microsoft SQL Azure serves as the portal’s database, storing information about each work location as well as users’ comments.
In addition, the portal uses Bing Maps to show users the highest-rated spots and how to find them. “By using the Bing Maps platform, we were able to support all the standards and APIs [application programming interfaces] needed to quickly get the portal up and running,” says Xavier Llobera, Business Development Manager at the Microsoft Innovation Center for Productivity. “Additionally, Bing allows us to rapidly launch new Third Place portals focused on other cities anywhere in the world.”
Benefits
Basing its Third Place portal on the Windows Azure platform enabled MIC Productivity to get the portal up and running very quickly for the City of Barcelona. The platform makes it possible to easily scale as user demand grows, while increasing mobile worker and tourist productivity.
Fast Time-to-Market
Launching the cloud-based portal on the Windows Azure platform took just six weeks, about half the three months it would have taken if the City of Barcelona purchased and configured its own servers, according to Llobera. “With Windows Azure, the infrastructure was already up and running in the cloud,” he says. “The city simply had to add its own data, which was much faster than implementing a portal using traditional, store-bought servers.”
Rapid Scalability
As more people have learned about Third Place, its use has grown, with the portal’s greatest popularity occurring between 9:00 A.M. and 3:00 P.M. (09:00 to 15:00). Because the solution is hosted on the Windows Azure platform, it can be easily scaled to offer users a seamless experience, even during peak demand times. “Windows Azure lets you adjust resources dynamically, ensuring that the system response will be fast, regardless of demand,” Llobera says.
Increased Worker Productivity
Perhaps most important, the City of Barcelona has increased productivity—both for residents and tourists working in third places. This, in turn, has enabled the city to better serve its citizens, while expanding the city’s reputation as a premiere location for business conferences.
“Various studies have demonstrated the positive impact mobile working has on a company—reduced time lost in travel, improved customer service, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, increased productivity, better work-life balance,” says Rodriguez. “Launching this service in the cloud has enabled us to position the City of Barcelona as a strategic meeting point in Europe.”
Given the portal’s success in Barcelona, MIC Productivity has already launched the solution in other Spanish cities, and plans to expand the portal to other parts of Europe in the future. “Professionals are spending more and more time working in locations other than the home or office,” says Llobera. “Ultimately, we believe this portal will prove a useful tool for many cities that seek to boost the competitive advantage of companies in their jurisdictions.”
For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/casestudies
