Product update – October 2022

Hello everyone,

Its been a very busy few months here at Matrix Booking and the number of items in this update certainly reflects this, so apologies for the length of the update, but please do take a few minutes to read through and share with any of your colleagues in the Facilities or Estate Management teams that you think may be interested in the new features and improvements outlined below.

As always, below is just a quick summary of the updates, so if you do have any questions about any of these items then please feel free to reach out to your account manager, and if you are not sure who your account manager is then just contact the general account management mailbox.

WHAT'S IN THIS UPDATE

New Visitor Management solution

We are extremely excited to launch a new application today as part of our Visitor Management solution called 'Visitor Management - Welcome App' - or just Welcome App for short.
This app is available for iOS tablet devices and also Android tablet devices. It is mainly aimed at 10"-12" devices and has all the combined functionality of our other visitor management applications in one! (Guestbook, Matrix Flow App and Visitor Self-Service Kiosk).
We have been running trials over the last few months with a number of customers and fine tuning the customer experience. The feedback has been extremely positive and so we have now reached a point where we are happy to fully launch this as a new product.

This new single app gives you much more flexibility than the previous apps when it comes to reception and visitor management as it allows you to combine the power and features of all three apps and gives improved personalisation for your brand and the specific reception locations.

Below is a screenshot of how the app looks on a reception kiosk:

This product is available now and upgrading from one of the existing applications is easy, so should you wish to find out more about it or have a quick demonstration to see how it can work for your organisation then please let your Account Manager know .

Increased visitor privacy options

Building on top of the existing privacy and GDPR settings within Matrix Booking, we have now added the ability to prevent staff from searching for visitors. Previously when adding an external visitor, the staff member could begin typing the visitors name to see if they were already booked in or registered in the system (some organisations already have a purge after xx days enabled to 'restrict' current searches). Whilst this ability to search added a great level of convenience for customers using the system there were some scenarios where organisations would rather staff have to enter all visitor details from scratch and not re use or even see other visitors booked in. To do this we have removed the ability to search for any visitors either from the 'New Booking' add attendee section or from the standalone 'Add Visitor' area. An example of how this change appears is shown below where you can see the 'Type to search for someone' box is no longer shown next to the Add an attendee button.

This change is a single privacy setting that applies across your whole organisation but if you do wish to have this enabled then please raise a support ticket in the normal way and we will enable this for your organisation

Retiring of products

With the launch of our new Welcome App mentioned above, it now gives us the opportunity to retire a few of our slightly older products. So, with immediate effect we have marked the following three products as END OF LIFE:

Visitor Self Service Kiosk
Matrix Flow App
Guestbook

As the products are 'end of life', this means we will no longer be selling them or renewing them and instead we will be planning a migration over to the Welcome App.
Therefore if you have one of these products you may well have already been involved in the early trial, but don't worry we will still continue to support the product whilst you have it, and our Account Management team will be contacting you over the coming weeks to discuss moving to the Welcome App.

If you have any questions regarding this then of course as always please just reach out to your account manager for more information.

Updated mobile apps

New versions of both our iOS and Android apps for Matrix Booking have been released to the app store. These new versions include a number of improvements, the most noticeable of which is the new branding and the changes to the colours used throughout the app. The result is much stronger and clearer contrast on all of the pages and we have included a screenshot of the Availability Search page below so you can see the difference.

In addition to the branding, the visitor suppression feature mentioned above has also been added to the mobile apps ensuring consistency across the product range and some other more cosmetic fixes that are listed towards the end of this update.

For those that have downloaded the new iOS version of the app and also use SSO, there may have been some initial teething issues with logging in but these should all now be resolved, but if you experience any issues at all then please raise a support ticket as usual.

New Room Signage Application

Following on from the recent rebranding changes with all of our applications, some minor design changes have now been made to the Signage App (for both Android and iOS):

Matrix Booking logo updated to the new logo on all screens including the log in screen.
Grey background on the setup screens.
Soft white circles or 'bubbles' as they were affectionately known, have been removed from the background on the home screen.

The new look and feel will be gradually rolled out automatically in the background over the next couple of weeks for those customers with 'Matrix Booking MDM' . For anyone else that is looking to rollout this new version, it can be downloaded from the APP stores or for Android users without access to Google play store we can make the files available to you by raising a support ticket . If you would like to request us to carry out this upgrade for you then please raise this request with your existing account manager in order to plan this.

Refresh of Office 365 Add-in

As part of the overall brand refresh our Office 365 Add-in has also had a small makeover. For those using the Office 365 integration, then using the Add-in gives even more flexibility and control over your search and now both the initial log in page (below left) and the search page (below right) all have the new branding.

Fixes in this release

Formatting of text was not displaying consistently for the help text, should now be fixed.
A runtime error was occasionally occurring when re-attempting to send an email that previously failed to send, should now be fixed.
Issue adding Teams booking to a O365 resource from Matrix, should now be fixed.
Update to the booking anonymisation process - We are changing this setting so that 1 now means yesterday rather than the day before. Any current customers will have their settings automatically updated to reflect - so if they currently had 1, it would become 2.
iOS & Android mobile app - Improved text ‘No <resource name> available’ is now: ‘No <resource name> available to book'.
Room Signage application - previously displaying incorrect error message about the time slot being unavailable when a room is restricted, this should now be fixed.

Data Protection (DPO & DPA)

Data Protection Office (DPO)

We are currently in the process of updating our internal records for tracking customer contacts for the DPO within your organisation. To ensure we have the correct and latest contact details for your DPO please can you provide these details to your Account Manager or email them to accountmanagement@matrixbooking.com so we can ensure we are able to contact your DPO should we ever need to.

Data Protection Agreement (DPA)

As with most organisations in the UK and EU currently, we are in the process of updating our DPA to include specific details on International Data Transfers. Our existing DPA (either the standalone version or the one include in your contract) is still valid, and when the new version is available we will reach out to you to discuss this. Part of this process will also include moving our Sub-Processor list to a web page so that you can always see the current version. We will be making a small amendment to our Sub-Processor list as part of this but only to remove some suppliers and to move one or two to EU/UK solutions rather than solutions hosted globally. Ensuring we have the correct contact for the DPO above will also help ensure that any notifications go to the correct people.

Internet Explorer 11 no longer supported

Last year (June 2021) we first announced that we would no longer be supporting Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) as the browser was no longer being supported by Microsoft and was being superseded by the newer Edge Browser. This transition was completed some time ago, however we have recently noticed from our general usage data that a few customers are still using IE11 to access Matrix Booking, and whilst it may still 'work', it is no longer a browser that we actively test on or develop for, so it is very possible your experience is not ideal or that you may encounter some issues using it. Whilst you are still free to use this old browser should you wish to, we strongly recommend that for security reasons as well as performance and experience, that you switch to a more up to date and secure browser. Any issues raised that are purely related to IE11 will of course be logged in the support portal for reference, however they will not actively be addressed in line with the browser no longer being supported.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding this, then as always please do discuss these with your Account Manager .

Meet the team

After recently attending the 'Government Property in 2030' conference in Manchester, the Matrix Booking team will be attending the following conferences and events over the next few months. If you are able to attend any of these it would be great to catch up with you in person or even virtually:

Public Sector Prop Tech - London 2nd November
NHS Property 2022 Conference- London 9th November
NHS Smart Estates Virtual Conference- 16th November
Worktech London- 22nd/23rd November
ISE Europe- 1st-3rd February

If you are able to attend any of the above please do reach out to your account manager .

Supporting Information

Please do ensure all of your administrators have access to our support portal to allow them to raise issues and in addition the following links may also be helpful:

View the our eLearning guide for general users
View our eLearning guide for Location Managers
Link to our support portal to raise issues

Why am I getting this email?

Finally, you are receiving this operational email because you are listed as an Administrator of Matrix Booking – if this is not the case or you no longer wish to receive these updates, then please click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email. Please remember that this is also the same contact list we use to advise of any system issues or service updates, so unsubscribing from this will unsubscribe you from both types of email.

As always though, if you are updating your workplace processes and rules or if you would like more information about anything in this email or our other products, then do 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