Frequently Asked Questions
Activation Questions
What is DNA Spaces & how can activating it add value to my business?
DNA Spaces is the world’s most powerful smart building cloud. It is the cloud-based evolution of the MSE & CMX products. You already have access to DNA Spaces licenses.
We are one of the fastest-growing SaaS products in Cisco’s portfolio currently. With over 1500 customers & 1.7 million APs, we are the largest deployed business outcomes cloud in the world with location, IoT & wi-fi onboarding services.
By activating you will be able to use your existing building network infrastructure to drive business outcomes. From our Back to business initiative for Covid-19, to Indoor IoT services that transform your Wi-Fi 6 APs as IoT gateways, DNA Spaces is at the forefront of driving innovation and value for Cisco customers.
Do I need to pay to activate my Cisco DNA Spaces account?
No, you already have paid access to Cisco DNA Spaces. They were either a part of the Cisco DNA Bundle purchase or a part of an A-la carte order made by your company.
Do I need to set up DNAC before activating DNA Spaces?
No, DNA Spaces is completely separate from DNA Center and is not reliant on DNAC being set up first.
I only recently purchased the Cisco DNA bundle and it is yet to be shipped. How can I activate Cisco DNA Spaces even before I install the APs?
You are not dependent on your newly purchased Cisco DNA bundle Access Points to get started. To showcase the value of the platform, for a limited time only, we’re allowing you to activate Cisco DNA Spaces across all your existing Access Points – even those outside of DNA bundle purchases. Please contact us at dnaspaces.cisco.com to kickstart the activation process across existing APs.
I’m not convinced Cisco DNA Spaces is right for my business at the moment. Do you have some specific use cases that I can evaluate?
Cisco DNA Spaces turns your buildings into smart spaces. It can enable you to return to work safely, deliver contactless yet personalized engagements, understand trends and patterns of visitor behavior, facilitate asset tracking, provide real-time insights into the temperature and humidity of your spaces and so much more! Here is a sample of the use cases that you will find:
- Behavior Monitoring Apps
- Detect and Locate: Detect and track devices connected to your network.
- Right Now: Check real-time behavior data across your properties.
- Analytics Apps
- Location Analytics: Slice and dice data to get a granular view of people’s behavior across locations.
- Impact Analysis: Measure the impact of at-location events, layout changes, and campaigns on people’s behavior.
- Safety and Compliance Apps
- Proximity Reporting: Do contact tracing on your Wi-Fi.
- Density Rules: Set people density and occupancy thresholds to drive safety and compliance at locations.
- Operational Efficiency Apps
- Asset Locator: Manage, monitor, and optimize your assets based on their location.
- STANLEY: Use a wide range of real-time location services apps for healthcare.
- IBM Tririga: Design a safe workplace, increase employee engagement, and drive operational efficiency via this robust real estate and facilities management platform.
- Wi-Fi Onboarding Apps
- OpenRoaming: Enable zero-touch Wi-Fi onboarding with reduced risk of MAC randomization.
- Captive Portals: Maximize the value of the Wi-Fi onboarding process for your guests and visitors by delivering a contextual user experience.
- Contactless Experience Apps
- Location Personas: Profile and segment visitors based on their at-location behavior.
- Engagements: Deliver contextual and personalized multichannel engagements to people within your buildings.
- Pointr: Combine indoor maps and accurate indoor positioning to digitize your spaces.
- MazeMap: Receive real-time indoor navigation and view available meeting spaces to improve the visitor experience.
Please email us at dnaspaces.cisco.com in case of additional queries.
I’m interested in the value of Cisco DNA Spaces but I’m too busy. How long will the activation process take?
Cisco DNA Spaces can be activated in less than 30 minutes. Most of our customers have been able to successfully activate on their own using our comprehensive setup guide. It comes with deployment prerequisites and step by step instructions on configuring your account.
To ensure your activation goes smoothly, we’re also happy to assist you through a webex call round the clock. Just email dnaspaces.cisco.com to let us know when you can spare 30 minutes and we’ll have you up and running in no time.
I’m concerned the deployment of Cisco DNA Spaces may impact my existing network configuration. Can you assure me it won’t?
The Cisco DNA Spaces Connector is tested to operate on the internet links with less than 0.1% packet loss. Our engineering has followed industry best practices of planning, design, and interoperability with the network layer. We are currently live without scale issues at over 156,000 business locations with 1.7 million live Access Points.
With 1000’s of customers onboarded without impacting their existing workflows or network configurations, we are confident of supporting you well. Our 24/7 Monitoring and support offers peace of mind.
Is it possible to activate Cisco DNA Spaces for only a few Access Points for now? If we’re happy with the results, we’ll consider activating across all our APs.
Yes, you may activate Cisco DNA Spaces for limited number of access points but the true value of Cisco DNA Spaces can only be realized when a customer activates it across their entire network. Capturing insights from people/things behavior and translating it into business value needs our system to recognize patterns from your network.
We understand if you want to start small, but as with any platform that uses data, you will see more accurate and relevant insights when you have a larger data set. To see the true value of Cisco DNA Spaces we encourage you to activate all your APs, or at least a category or group of properties that will make benchmarking possible.
Activating and configuring Cisco DNA Spaces requires access to network login details. I don’t have the necessary approvals. Can I get another team member to activate it?
Absolutely. If you have your Cisco DNA Spaces login credentials, you can log in to the dashboard and click the ‘Admin Management’ section on the left hand side navigation. It will allow you to invite another team member to setup your account for your organization.
In case, you aren’t able to access Cisco DNA Spaces dashboard, please send an email to dnaspaces.cisco.com with the name and email address of the relevant person, and we’ll invite them on your behalf.