Page 1 | Improving the commuter experience with Microsoft Azure
Improving the commuter experience with Microsoft Azure
Microsoft offers employees a comprehensive range of transportation choices, from Connector buses, to theShuttle Connect fleet, and manypublic transportation options. Currently, discovering and managing the various transportation options across multiple apps and portals is complex.So Microsoft IThas partnered with the Microsoft Real Estate and Facilitiesgroup to simplify the transportation user experience andincrease ridership and user satisfaction. The new solution, called Transportation Hub, is now in pilot testing.
Transportation Hub is hosted in Microsoft Azure—it’s a mobile, responsive web app that our employees can access from any device or platform. Microsoft employees can use it to review, reserve, and customize their trips, receive active feedback and recommendations for their preferred commute options,andreduce the number of single-occupancy trips, which supports the Microsoft environmental stewardship initiative.
Integrating transportation data and interfaces
Transportation Hub gives Microsoft employees insight into and control over their options for getting from place to place within the urban areas that Microsoft Real Estate and Facilities supports. For a truly integrated experience, we’ve designed Transportation Hub to interact with many transportation data sources—including Microsoft Connector bus service, Campus Shuttle, Bing Maps, traffic and location services, as well as public transit and other mass commute programs.
We’ve built Transportation Hub completely in Microsoft Azure, which enables us to provide a universally accessible user interface.The Transportation Hub interface has benefits that include:
- Access from anywhere, regardless of connectivity to the Microsoft Corporate network.
- A highly available and reliable platform.
- Configurable and ubiquitous access to external transportation data sources and stores.
The integrated nature of Transportation Hub is critical to its success. We want people to see all their transportation options in one interface and we want them to interact with the transportation options that are available to them. We also want people to have access to all information that they might need to make informed transportation decisions.
Transportation Hub willwork with our internal Microsoft transportation providers—andwith public transportation in the areaswhere we operate. We’ve worked hard with municipaltransportation providers to design our app to work with their data sources and to help them to standardize their own data so that future integration is streamlined and faster.
Transportation Hub implementation
We host Transportation Hub in Azure and manage development using Visual Studio Team Services. By using this combination, wecan develop in an agile environment using continuous integration and continuous deployment. The Transportation Hub interface is built in an Azure web app that interfaces with a Transportation API hosted as an Azure App Service. The Transportation API is directly integrated into the Real Estate and Facilities API, which provides access to other functionality and information from Real Estate and Facilities sources, including the connection to various transportation services through third-partyAPIs.
Figure 1. Transportation Hub architecture
Using meaningful data to improve user experience
The business intelligence and reporting component of Transportation Hub is designed to collectmetrics about how our users consume and interact with their transportation options. This data is represented visuallyina Power BI dashboard that hasmultiple views ofthe data that Transportation Hub maintains.
Figure 2. Power BI dashboard views of Transportation Hub data
Moving toward a more efficient employee experience
Transportation Hub is designed to make commutingeasier for our employees, which willimprove their work experience and increase satisfaction with our transportation and facilities options. Transportation Hub collects employee commute usage data and uses that data to help our employees make intuitive and informed transportation decisions across all of the public and private transportation options available to them. Itassessesemployee behavior and schedules and uses business intelligence algorithms to give greater flexibility in understanding and using transportation options.
Transportation Hub is aunified transportation platform hosted in Microsoft Azure,which provides Real Estate and Facilities with a comprehensive view of commuter behavior tooptimize customer service and operations. Transportation Hub uses large-scale data capturing, analytics, and Power BI to help optimize transportation asset use, support a continuously improving customer experience, and drive operational efficiencies across the system.
For more information
Microsoft IT
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IT Showcase Article
microsoft.com/itshowcaseDecember2016