Two days before I left p&p, we finally got the new space that we’d been fighting for.
History
The development teams at p&p have historically been fighting to get good group collab workspaces. We ran projects using a modified version of eXtreme Programming, and believed that being together in a room would help the team tremendously. The first “stolen” space was known as the “Delta Lounge” and was the subject of a couple podcasts. The Enterprise Library 1.0 team was the one that occupied the space. It started out that they would book the conference room for weeks at a time. The building admins caught on, and cancelled the reservations. This turned into an escalating process of reserving by day, then by hour, for a variety of people, until the admins finally gave up and let the team have the room.
After EntLib shipped, the room was expected to go back online as a conference room, but the CAB 1.0 team wanted to use it. Again, this escalated a few times until the admins finally found a permanent space for the team (a cluster of 10 offices in a 5x2, with the walls knocked down, that had been a large lab).
The New Space
After much finagling, the Workplace Advantage team chose p&p as one of their pilots for building new spaces at Microsoft. The construction took a fairly quick eight weeks, considering the fact that they had to gut and refinish an entire quarter of a floor of the building. The team moved in on Thursday, May 10. The space is absolutely fantastic, and I hope to fight the same battle on my team to get a space like that.
The space is designed as a set of 5 collaboration spaces in the middle, with offices around the outside. A few of the offices along the outside are double or triple offices for small functional collaboration space. Most of the walls are made with demountable partitions, which allows the space to be reconfigured fairly easily (they’re sturdy enough that it takes 24 hours and professionals to do it, so they’re not cheap walls, and they do go floor to ceiling).
We also included our own private conference room with a high definition projector (and high definition video tele-conferencing (VTC) coming soon), which serves primarily as the space we give to customers when they come on-site to visit and work with us.
Many of the walls are glass, which allows natural light and outside views to flow through the entire space. All electrical lighting is either indirect up-lighting or focused task lighting. Every light is on a dimmer switch, and the collab spaces has as many as a half-dozen each, so you can adjust specific banks of lights to specific brightnesses.
Every desk has a dual-monitor mounting arm to raise LCD monitors off the desk. Every desk has at least one monitor, and the developers and architects have two.
Each collaboration space includes a high definition projector and speakers in the ceiling for the team’s use. Each collab space also contains its own thermostat so the team can adjust the temperature to their comfort. Most of the glass walls in the collaboration space actually have whiteboard film in between the two panes of glass, so the amount of available whiteboard surface is huge (and no more ghosting, as is common with the laminated whiteboard surfaces most people use).
Pictures
The Smart Client Software Factory team in the 8–person collab space. The far wall with the giant Post-It notes is the glass with whiteboard film. This particular room also has floor to ceiling doors with whiteboard surfaces on them (in the upper right of the picture), which allow it to open onto the group lounge space (which has a 60” Plasma TV and Xbox!). The blue tape on the windows is because the logo etching hasn’t been done yet, so those nice clean windows are a little too easy to accidentically walk into. :-p
The Mobile team in one of the smaller collab spaces. You can see the (red) curtains that can be drawn between some of the collab spaces. The movable walls aren’t yet in place, because they were back-ordered. Truth is, the curtains do a great job of sound deadening. The collab spaces which were designed for VTC have brown curtains instead of red.
A view into one of the shared offices. The doors everywhere slide instead of swing to make sure you have more usable floor space. You can see the glass door with its brown frame (and Post-It note :-p). This space is configured for a few individuals (only one desk is shown), and a small lounging/whiteboard space on the right edge. The building p&p is in is surrounded by lots of trees. 
An impromptu meeting in one of the collab spaces, currently configured as a lounge.