Product update – February 2025

Hello everyone,

This is our first real product update for 2025 - and it’s quite a large one with a number of new developments, launches, and announcements. As an Administrator or key contact for Matrix Booking, we recommend you take a few moments to read the items below.

To find out more about anything mentioned in this update, please contact your Account Manager.

What’s in this update?

Matrix Booking Insight launch

Our new workplace analytics solution, Matrix Booking Insight, has now been released and from Friday 21 February 2025, all organisation Administrators will have access automatically.

To access this, simply log in as an Administrator for your organisation, then click the REPORTS link in the main top navigation.

You will now see a new link in the left hand menu, 'Matrix Booking Insight - new' as shown in this image.

This will launch the new reporting area of our application.

All Administrators will have access to three core dashboards, these were outlined in a previous update but a summary is also shown below.

If you have access to other dashboards (for example, if you use our sensor solutions or for our Attendance reporting), these dashboards will also be available using this link.

We’re launching with three main (Core) dashboards but this will expand as and when new dashboards become available.

These three dashboards for launch are:

Booking history 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.
Building usage dashboard
This dashboard provides both high-level and detailed breakdowns of the number of people attending the office during a given period.
Resource usage dashboard
This dashboard provides an interactive, data-driven dashboard showing the usage of desks, rooms, and other resources across your estate.

These dashboards are currently in BETA, meaning we're still working on improving them based on feedback from customers who have been trialling these already. Although branded as BETA, the reports and data within them are very much live and accurate. Your Matrix Booking Insight landing page will look a little like this:

We’re aiming to launch an e-Learning module soon to help you navigate through the dashboards, which will appear in the Training Hub.

Although for launch we've restricted this to Administrators, if there is someone in your organisation that needs access to these reports then please raise a support ticket providing their email address and we'll amend their access.

If you have any questions about this new reporting solution, please contact your Account Manager or Customer Success Manager.

New accessible booking application

Following on from our previous announcement in December we are pleased to bring you news on the next update to our new booking application that will, in time, replace our existing web booking platform.

In addition to the previous functionality delivered, you now have the ability to:

Make a booking on behalf of others (change booking owner).
Add a Microsoft Teams online meeting link.
Choose a room layout.
Request catering, additional equipment, or services.
Create, edit or cancel a repeat booking.
View resource information (for example, photos or facilities).

As we continue to build more and more features in this new application, it’s an exciting time to get involved - try it out and give us your feedback to help shape the future of Matrix Booking. You can find more information on how to access it and how to provide feedback here.

Administrator support options

We’ve also added some new features just for you Administrators to make your life a little bit easier when finding things and telling us what you think.

As an Administrator, when you log in, you'll see Matrix administrator support as an option in your toolbar. Previously, this took you straight to the Support Portal to raise issues - instead this will now present you with three options as shown below:

The existing link to the Support Portal for reporting issues and asking questions
The new Tell us what you think link which is a quick and easy way to access our feedback surveys. If you have any suggestions or ideas, or you’d like to share any thoughts you have about Matrix Booking, this survey provides an opportunity for you to tell us if we're doing well or where we can improve.
Latest updates is a new direct link to see the product update emails that we send out. Often its easy to miss these emails, so now you can see them all in one place and see what new features and functions we have just released. As an Administrator, you'll still get these emails.

For any customers that use our Admin as a Service (AaaS) product you'll also see in this drop-down menu the opportunity to start a Support chat in real-time.

Outlook application support

As you may have heard, Microsoft have removed support for “COM” add-ins in their newer versions of Outlook meaning older Outlook add-in's belonging to all suppliers (including Matrix Booking) will no longer work. If you want to keep using our add-in, remember, don’t select the Try the new version button as this will upgrade your version of Outlook. If you would like to discuss alternative Microsoft integration options that are supported, contact your account manager.

As a reminder this is not related to Office 365 Integration, this is only the older direct integration with the Outlook application.

How are we doing?

We’d love to hear from you! Your thoughts and opinions mean the world to us, and they help us make your experience even better. Our (very) quick survey is a chance for you to share what you love and what we can improve. It only takes a few minutes, and your feedback makes a big difference. Thanks for helping us grow and improve—we’re so grateful for your support!

Tell us what you think

We took all of the feedback submissions so far and have selected an organisation at random to receive the free training session. We’re pleased to announce that the winner was:

Please keep your feedback coming as it's very important to us and we’ll select another winner next time.

Fixes in this update

Since our last release in December, we’ve released the following fixes and improvements:

We have made a change not to allow both a VC endpoint and a 365 calendar to be selected on the same resource to avoid this problem.
We've improved the wording for booking cancellations to ensure accuracy when an organiser or Location Manager cancels a booking they have made for another user. We no longer advise that the meeting cancellation has been sent to the attendees as no meeting cancellation is performed.
A change to allow a user switching from SSO to a Username / Password authentication to be able to now reset their own password for first login.
A change to how we deal with special characters when importing users. This means that we can now accept special characters (for example é, è, â, ñ, ü) and process them correctly, rather than displaying an error when viewing the user after import or showing a “?” in a users name
We've improved the warning messaging for cross-time zone bookings when a repeat booking is made. This enhancement will include the date as well as the time of the first and last bookings, and for singular bookings will include the date of the booking.
A change has also been made to improve the ordering of Users when looking at user groups. We'll now display the users in an alphabetical order by first name and we’ve added a dividing line to separate out deactivated users, which are now also displayed in alphabetical order.
Administrators now have the ability to rename a deactivated user without having to reactivate them first.
On a number of different reports, we have now added the dynamic date field of yesterday - today and tomorrow were already there.
The maximum number of results returned when clicking on MyBookings has been increased from 100 to 500.
A bug preventing you from exporting the data from the My bookings report has now been resolved.

Meet the team

Members of Matrix Booking recently attended two large events:

Anticipate London: 2 - 4 December 2024

Matrix Booking had a fantastic time exhibiting at Anticipate London, connecting with workplace and facilities management professionals from across the industry. We showcased our new Matrix Booking Sense occupancy solution and had insightful discussions about the future of work and the evolving needs of hybrid workplaces.

Integrated Systems Europe (ISE): 4- 7 February 2025

We were delighted to join our digital display suppliers ProDVX recently for ISE. ISE is the world’s leading AV and systems integration exhibition, showcasing the latest innovations in smart technology. We were pleased to have representatives from Matrix Booking at the show and it was an honour to see our meeting room booking software showcased on the ProDVX display and to experience some of their latest, cutting-edge technology in action. You can find out more about our meeting room displays, visitor check-in kiosks and more on our website.

Other upcoming events:

How Facilities Managers can create the Perfect Balance: 27 February 2025 (free online webinar, see below)
The W orkplace Event: 8 -10 April 2025 (NEC, Birmingham)
HEFMA leadership forum: 8-10 May 2025 (Telford)

For more information about these and other events, visit the events area on our website.

Additional training and support

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 ensure 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 to use Training Hub. Some of the e-learning modules may be useful for your wider teams so please feel free to link to these from your internal knowledge bases, Sharepoint / intranet. The training hub can be found using this link:

https://training.matrixbooking.com

If you would like to arrange any refresher training for your teams, contact your Account Manager who will arrange this for you.

Update to list of sub-processors

We’ve made a couple of small amendments to our sub-processor list as follows:

Added confirmation (for clarity) that all data transfers are bound by the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) / Data Bridge and the “UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework” (UK Extension) under Article 45 of the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Addition of Matomo as an EU-based tool to analyse usage of our websites and applications.
Addition of Sentry as an EU-based tool to provide application crash reporting.
Removal of Logentries as no longer used.

If you've previously provided us with an email address for your DPO (Data Protection Officer), they will have also had a copy of this update.

Supporting Information

Please do ensure all of your administrators have access to our Support Portal to allow them to raise issues. Here are some useful links:
Our Support Portal for guides, troubleshooting and raising issues.
Our Administrators guide for detailed instructions on how to amend and change settings.

Why am I getting this email?

You’re receiving this operational email because you’re either a Matrix Booking Administrator or you’re registered with us as a key contact involved with Matrix Booking. If this isn’t the case or you no longer wish to receive these updates, select the update your preferences link at the bottom of this email.

This is also the same contact list we use to advise of any system issues or service updates. If you fully unsubscribe from this, you’ll unsubscribe from both types of email.

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