From advanced catering and booking policy updates for tailor-made hybrid work initiatives, to huge improvements on a now dedicated visitor management app for streamlined front-of-house tasks - we’re super proud of our spring and summer development roadmap for IBSS, and the flexibility this will bring our workplace customers.
So, what exactly is coming?
1. Advanced Catering
When it comes to creating an unforgettable meeting experience, catering and in-person hospitality is essential. It’s one of several human-centric experiences that virtual meetings simply can’t recreate.
What we currently have Roamer, Unity, and Flex currently support basic catering requests as part of standard meetings and space bookings – this means office workers can order things like coffee, pastries, and sandwiches to their meetings either directly through an office experience mobile app (Roamer), personal workplace web portal (Flex), or an in-room wall-mounted tablet for room control (Unity). What’s coming and why it matters As part of our next release though, we are extending this functionality to allow workplace teams to define role-based catering privileges and policies (i.e., who can order what, and how far in advance users can order), as well who pays for what (i.e., cost codes and assigned departmental expenses and budgets). Our new catering workflows will also pick up back-of-house tasks like delivery and tidy up allowing workplace teams to focus on making the meeting a success and not jumping from one booking system to another. To wrap this all up in a data-driven fashion, our analytics and reporting options will break down usage data on menu items, workspace vs catering usage, and departmental analytics.
This is a game-changer for streamlining operations, reducing costs and wastage, and allowing staff to focus on the important meeting stuff.
2. Enhanced Booking Policy Updates
Booking desks, rooms, and resources has always been a critical feature of hybrid working. Office workers need to do know what workspaces and resources are available and when in order to properly collaborate with their teams.
What we currently have
IBSS as a unified booking platform is already being used extensively across commercial real estate and higher education. From native desk and room booking to colleague-finding and resource booking, workplace teams can tailor building-wide booking policies to suit the nuances of how their organization is implementing technology-driven flexible work.
What’s coming and why it matters
As a tenant or building owner though, I may want to be able to apply different booking policies to different workspaces or buildings. This may be certain rules for a group of desks in one area of the building need to be different to similar desks in another, or it could mean that each workspace type needs to have a different policy to ensure its utilisation is as
efficient as you can make it. Whatever your needs, the IBSS advanced booking policies capability is intended to allow the organisation to have more control of who books what, on what days, and for how long. This update has also been designed to allow you to tailor other behaviours like, how far in advance bookings can be made, what the cancellation and “no-show” terms are (i.e., the number of minutes threshold before a booking is cancelled if no one checks-in after a book), and much more – all without actually impacting the front-end booking experience of office staff.
These rules and settings are all client managed configured via the Admin Portal in IBSS Hub and a standard part of the Azure-based Digital Twin data model. Naturally this brings our clients fidelity, but more importantly it brings them workplace flexibility. Workplace teams can tailor the subtleties of flexible work and fine-tune how this is working or not working for each local space and building.
3. Dedicated Visitor Management App and Advanced Capabilities
What we currently have
Our Digital Signage and Workplace Kiosk App - Inspire has had a working front-of-house visitor management mode for a long time now. It currently supports intuitive check-in/out experiences, as well as smooth hand off between our tenant experience mobile app and emailed QR codes for hassle-free registration and internal alerts.
What’s coming and why it matters
As part of our drive, to help reduce the load on front of house staff, we are extending Inspire’s Visitor Management mode to take some of the burden away from registering guests into the building. At present, you can pre-register visitors as part of a booking, or on-the-fly via our OneLens and Roamer Apps, but soon ad-hoc visitors will also be able to register directly using our Visitor Management App. So those visitors, who turn up unexpected, or accompany a pre-registered visitor, can now be added to the system through a series of simple steps, that will take away some of the burden of needing to direct them to fill in specific forms/guest books. This is just one of many visitor management capabilities we are getting ready to release, and soon we will be extending this functionality to support more visitor types, NDA and data protection sign ups, car parking hand-offs and much more.
Stay tuned for more updates coming soon.