Microsoft’s Immersive Suite: A New Approach to Collaboration

As technology and business environments grow increasingly complex, the ability to establish shared understanding across disciplines has become critical. At Microsoft’s Immersive Suite in Amsterdam, immersive collaboration environments play a central role in how the company works with customers, partners, and internal teams across industries. Cyviz’ platform enables this content to be deployed, managed, and experienced seamlessly in an immersive environment, ensuring a consistent and reliable experience across sessions. Watch video from Immersive Suite >>

The space is designed for active collaboration rather than one-way presentations. Visual narratives, data, and technical content are explored interactively, allowing participants to test scenarios, align perspectives, and move from discussion to decision more efficiently.

“We deliberately work with familiar tools like PowerPoint. That allows us to focus on storytelling and interaction rather than explaining technology, which makes collaboration more natural and effective,” says Joris Haverkort, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Netherlands.

A key principle behind the Immersive Suite is simplicity at scale. Rather than relying on specialized or proprietary tools, Microsoft teams build their stories using applications they already use every day.

“Instead of presenting to customers, we use the Immersive Suite to work together with them, exploring ideas, data, and scenarios in a much more interactive way,” Haverkort adds.

From presentation to problem-solving

Microsoft describes a clear shift in how it engages with customers: moving away from traditional presentations towards interactive, co-creative working sessions. Immersive technology supports this shift by allowing teams to work directly with content in real time, making complex challenges easier to understand and solve collaboratively.

“When people can see and interact with information in the same space, conversations change. It leads to better alignment and more informed decisions,” says Haverkort.

The Immersive Suite in Amsterdam is part of Microsoft’s initiative in the Netherlands, which uses immersive environments to help organizations explore how technology can be applied to real business challenges across industries such as energy, manufacturing, finance, and the public sector.

Technology designed to support decisions

The Immersive Suite has been delivered by the Norwegian technology and platform provider Cyviz, which specializes in standardized platforms for high-impact visualization, collaboration, and decision-support environments.

“Microsoft’s approach shows that immersive environments don’t need to be complex to be powerful,” says John van Laerhoven, Regional Sales Director at Cyviz.

“Our role is to provide a standardized platform that allows organizations to build advanced collaboration around familiar tools, reliably, at scale, and with consistent quality”.

Immersive Suites are increasingly becoming a strategic tool for organizations working with complex decisions, large data volumes, and cross-functional teams, where usability, reliability, and consistency are essential in both physical and hybrid settings.

Facts

• Installed at Microsoft’s Innovation Hub in Amsterdam, hosting hundreds of client engagements annually
• Delivered using Cyviz’ standardized immersive collaboration platform
• Enables immersive storytelling using familiar tools such as PowerPoint
• Used for co-creation, customer collaboration, and decision support