Hello everyone,
This update is quite a large one and has a number of new developments, launches, and announcements. As an Administrator or key contact for Matrix Booking, we would highly recommend you take a few moments to read the items below.
Should you wish to find out more about any of these areas or if any are not clear, contact your Account Manager .
What's in this update?
Matrix Booking Insight – workplace analytics
Our workplace analytics solution, called Matrix Booking Insight, is now in the final stages of testing with some customers. For any customers with early access (including those using our sensor dashboards), there will be a few small changes that you notice immediately, such as the ability to sort the various dashboards and search for them (new option in the top right of your Insight page). Although the number of dashboards available is currently limited, we’ll be releasing a number of new ones over the next two months.
When these new dashboards are released, they will be released to all full admins in your organisation and released to all organisations. In addition to the standard Matrix Booking web app reports, you’ll also have a link to hop across to our new, more powerful Insight reports. For launch, we’re aiming to restrict this to full admins. After that, we’ll look into allowing you to grant access to these reports to anyone in your organisation that may need them.
The dashboards we will be launching with first will be:
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All Bookings dashboard
This dashboard provides a faster, more intuitive, and reliable way to view and analyse an organisation’s booking data. This dashboard doesn’t have the 5,000 results limit that our web app’s All Bookings report has.
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Usage dashboard
This dashboard provides an interactive, data-driven dashboard showing the usage of desks, rooms, and other resources across your estate.
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Attendance dashboard
This dashboard provides both high-level and detailed breakdowns of the number of people attending the office during a given period.
Once these dashboard are delivered, the Matrix Booking Insight landing page will look a little like this:
We’re aiming to launch Insight in September 2024 and we’ll keep you posted as that date approaches. Just before the launch, we’ll also be releasing Insight e-learning modules so you can start to familiarise yourself with the dashboards before they launch. If you’re interested in finding out more about the above dashboards before our September 2024 launch, contact your Account Manager .
New iOS and Android mobile applications
In the last product update, we showed you a few screenshots of our new mobile app. This is a complete rebuild of the app as we migrate it to a new platform that will allow us to deploy changes more responsively and allow us to create a more accessible app. In fact, compliance with WCAG 2.2 AA standard is something that is a key part of this release and we’re extremely excited about. We’re expecting to launch these apps shortly after 15 August 2024. If you have any internal documentation that includes screenshots, you may wish to update these to reflect the improved look, feel, and functionality.
The new version (version 5.0) will be available through the app stores as an update to the existing apps. If you have automatic updates switched on, you should receive it shortly after that. If you update your device manually, we strongly recommend you update it as soon as the version shows in your app store as the experience is significantly improved when using the new version.
The mobile app section of the standard user e-learning modules will be updated a week ahead of the launch meaning you should be able to see the differences in advance, should you wish.
The below table shows a summary of the new features and benefits of this latest version.
However, all of these changes mean that from the above launch date, we’ll be supporting only the latest three versions of iOS, so from iOS 15 to iOS 17 currently. This brings us more inline with most other providers, and the Apple- and Android-recommended approach for maintaining a secure application environment.
If you have any questions about this or you think you are using an older version of iOS or Android, contact your Account Manager .
New release of room or desk Signage application
At the end of this month (August 2024), we’re aiming to release a new version of our Signage app. Many customers use this for room signage (wall-mounted outside meeting rooms), but some also use it for desks and desk banks.
In this new version, we’ll be adding the following new features and changes:
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QR code authentication and booking allowing users with SSO to authenticate and make bookings on their signage device via a QR code.
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Ability to capture the attendee count field that will also help power and drive some of the new reporting features.
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Greatly improved technical approach that streamlines how the signage devices talk to Matrix Booking making this more efficient and robust.
Below is a screenshot showing the flow when QR code is enabled for making a booking:
We’re aiming to have this app available in the app stores from 31 August 2024. Shortly after that, we’ll push the update automatically to those customers with Hardware as a Service (HaaS) devices, so the transition will be seamless. For any customers that purchase hardware from us and have our Mobile Device Management (MDM) installed, we’ll be able to push this update to your devices whenever you’re ready.
For customers that have purchased their own hardware, we’ll make the software available to you immediately after launch and we would encourage you to upgrade to this new version as soon as you can.
As the Signage app has now evolved quite considerably from early versions and because security patches for older version of Signage become harder to obtain and support, we’re now marking certain versions of hardware and certain versions of our Signage app as “end-of-life”. This means you should be actively looking to transition away from them to a more up-to-date, secure version.
From the beginning of September 2024, the following software and hardware will now be end-of-life, and therefore fixed on a best endeavours basis:
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Matrix Booking Signage versions lower than 1.14.
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Android devices running operating systems earlier than version 8.1.
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iOS devices running operating systems earlier than version iOS 15.
As mentioned, the upgrade path for customers for our new Signage app is:
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HaaS customers – no action needed the update will be applied automatically.
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Customers that purchase hardware from us – raise a support ticket to request the upgrade.
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Customers that purchase their own hardware – raise a support ticket to either access the upgrade link or to request professional services for us to carry out your upgrade.
If you have any further questions regarding our new Signage app, contact your Account Manager .
Sensors and people counters (updated product)
We’re pleased to announce a new upgrade to our Matrix Booking Sense solution as it’s been designed to be used with any sensor brand. It seamlessly integrates with any open-source sensor technologies, ensuring you can take advantage of both current and future advancements. This flexibility allows you to implement our sensor products or incorporate your existing sensor infrastructure into our booking platform to deliver rich, comprehensive reporting capabilities.
You’ll gain unparalleled insights into your workplace occupancy and environmental data. Our solution can merge booking data with occupancy and environmental data, enabling you to identify and address estate wastage. We give you data on the past, present, and future so you can easily plan your organisation's estate in the coming years. This powerful reporting empowers you to optimise your workspace utilisation, ensuring maximum efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
To find out more about Matrix Booking Sense and how this might work for you, contact your Account Manager .
Technical upgrade of Java
This upgrade is a technical update only from Java 8 to Java 11. There are no customer-facing changes or impact to the software or application.
This upgrade provides many vulnerability fixes and ensures that our libraries and dependencies remain supported and up to date. The update also has a number of new features and other enhancements that we’ll be able to build upon in future enhancements.
Three applications retired
As we first mentioned back in October 2022, we’re retiring three applications:
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Guestbook
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Visitor Self-Service Kiosk
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Flow app
These products have been end-of-life for over 18 months now. Our date for moving them to end-of-support was July 2024. Therefore, as of 29 July 2024, these three applications will be moved to end-of-support meaning that:
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They are removed from all app stores and download sites.
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There is no support provided for these applications at all.
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Any organisation using them should stop immediately as they are no longer receiving security patches or updates, and therefore will become a potential risk to anyone using them.
Our replacement application, Matrix Booking Welcome, provides most of the functionality that these three applications gave. Our Account Management Team have been speaking to any customer using these applications over the last 18 months to plan their migration.
If you do have any questions regarding this, contact your Account Manager .
Visitor management update
We’re currently reaching out to a number of our customers that use visitor management to get their feedback on how it works for them and where we can improve it. However, if we haven’t spoken to you yet and you’d like to share your thoughts, we’d love to here from you.
Take our Visitor Management Survey
We’ll be using the feedback from this survey to enhance our future visitor management roadmap and we’d like to encourage you to have your say if you use our visitor management software. As a reminder, we do have a free-to-use Receptionist e-learning module on our Training Hub that reception and front-of-house teams often find useful.
Fixes in this update
Since our last release in June, we’ve deployed the following fixes and improvements (some are technical and some relate to issues customers may have raised):
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Issues deleting obsolete organisations resolved.
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Large amount of additional logging added to capture technical information to enhance support and performance.
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Change to allow anonymous bookings from Signage when linked to Microsoft 365.
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Additional features added to help customers migrate to Microsoft 365.
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Adding more logic to ensure that incorrect combi-room Microsoft 365 bookings are ignored.
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Update the marker styling on the Floor Plan Editor.
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Improved the way work area and resource markers are shown on floor plans.
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Improvements made to the type ahead location search feature to improve performance and usability.
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Issue resolved where some new floor plans would not work in the Floor Plan Editor.
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Various features have been improved behind the scenes to make them run more efficiently.
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Reduced the amount of database calls to improve performance.
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Investigations completed to identify the booking source for all unlabelled requests.
Meet the team
Matrix Booking is incredibly proud to be recognised as a winner of the Culture 100 Award 2024.
The Culture 100 Award 2024 Growth Edition honours tech companies with fewer than 75 employees who have demonstrated a positive workplace culture over the past 12 months. The award celebrates organisations that prioritise employee growth, innovation, and engagement.
For more information, see our website .
Other upcoming events:
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Government Property 2024 : 11 September 2024 (Manchester)
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Healthcare Estates : 8 to 9 October 2024 (Manchester Central)
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NHS Property 2024 : 6 November 2024 (London)
For more information about these and other events, visit the events area on our website .
Additional support and Training Hub
As we continually rollout new functions and features, you may find it useful to refresh your knowledge of our product and how it can help your business, especially as everyone’s journey into hybrid working is different.
It might be helpful to make sure you and your fellow Matrix Booking Administrators arrange some refresher training. This can be in dedicated sessions or it could be just using the e-learning modules we have available in our free Training Hub . Some of the e-learning modules may be useful for your wider teams, feel free to link to these from your internal knowledge bases, Sharepoint, or intranet.
If you would like to arrange any refresher training for your teams, contact your Account Manager who will arrange this for you.
Supporting information
Make sure all of your Administrators have access to our Support Portal to allow them to raise issues and access to .
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If you’re updating your workplace processes and rules or if you would like more information about anything in this email or our other products, contact us to see how we can provide help or support with those plans and using Matrix Booking in general.
Regards from everyone here at Matrix Booking,
Ian Jones
Director of Operations