AskCody Product Update: Security, Compliance & Scalability Upgrade

This is your April product update on the AskCody platform. The purpose of the blog is to give you a firsthand view of our product development pipeline. 

• NEWS --> Security, compliance & scalability: Major infrastructure upgrade - 5 Alternative use-cases - Solved Issue Adding Visitors  
• NOW --> Microsoft Graph - Workplace Central
• NEXT--> Single Sign-On - Visitors internationalization - Business Insights
• FUTURE --> Statement Of Direction 

This blog may include plans, predictions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. All forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

1. NEWS

1.1 Security, compliance & scalability: Major infrastructure upgrade due Monday, May 16, 2022.
Security and compliance have always been our focus. We are ISAE3000 certified, have taken supplementary measures based on EDPB guidelines, and are protected against OWASP's top 10 security risks and vulnerabilities.

Monday, May 16, 2022, we are releasing a major infrastructure upgrade that will keep us at the forefront of technology with the latest security standards, including a number of platform improvements that will enable us to work more efficiently going forward.

A maintenance service window will be running from Monday, May 16, 2022 at 8:00 AM CEST to Friday, May 20, 2022 at 10:00 PM CEST to ensure maximum operability of the AskCody platform. We recommend subscribing to status.askcody.com to stay informed about any unlikely impacts to our services.

With this release, we look forward to continuing to provide our customers with the latest technology for security, compliance, and scalability.

1.2 Five Meeting & Visitor Management System Features You Didn't Kow You Needed

Get inspired by the alternative use-cases for AskCody that could bring more value to your business. Check our five unique features, that you might not know you could use AskCody for:

1. Carpark booking
2. Employee registration
3. Sharing Covid-19 regulations with visitors
4. Buffer time for room cleaning and table arrangements
5. Equipment booking

1.3 Solved problem when adding expected visitors

We have now solved a problem that when organizations located in the New York time zone (EST) added expected visitors through the Management Portal, they were not added to the selected arrival date, but to the day before. Visitors are now added to the selected date.

2. NOW: What Are We Currently Working On

We are continually improving the core of our platform based on input from our customers. Below you can find the primary things our product and development departments are focusing on at the time of writing.

2.1 Microsoft Graph Integration

Our Exchange integration ensures a single source of truth for our customers and is currently built on Exchange Web Services (EWS). The successor for EWS is Microsoft Graph and this will be the future gateway for data and intelligence in Microsoft 365. To keep our tight integration to Exchange and open for future innovation on our platform, we are currently working to integrate to Microsoft Graph. This integration continues to be a top priority since it enables other projects like The New Workplace Central.

2.2 The New Workplace Central

We have now started the work to create the New Workplace Central. This includes building the technical foundation and a completely new user interface.  We want to empower facility teams and booking coordinators with an improved layout and user experience by creating a new Workplace Central. This will provide a grid-like overview of all rooms and desk bookings including service requests and notes. The goal is to make it easy to get a quick overview of all activities in the office.

First draft mockup of a grid view in the new Workplace Central

3. NEXT: What We Will Work On Next​

Soon we will start working on the following product improvements to the platform. Note that this is not an exhaustive list and that we are continuously looking for opportunities to provide other valuable improvements.

3.1 Single Sign-On 

To give enhanced security & access control and an improved user experience for end-users we want to implement Microsoft Single Sign-On in the AskCody platform. This will give our users two benefits:

• Improved security and access control through Microsoft's technology with the option for two-factor authentication. With SSO access management can be overseen from within Azure Active Directory instead of the AskCody portal. 
• People can use their already familiar Microsoft credentials to login to login to the AskCody portal, not having to remember additional user names and passwords.

3.2 Visitors Internationalization

We want to improve how our Visitor Management handles languages for visitors, receptions, and hosts for large enterprises that either span multiple locations or are situated in multi-lingual areas. This will include sending guiding emails and texts to visitors and hosts in their chosen language. 

3.3 Business Insights 

We want to improve and add more insights and analytics to our platform to enable organizations to make valuable workplace improvements. It must be easy to understand and use data proactively through tangible recommendations. You can already now benefit from using our Workplace Insights, read more on How To Benefit From Workplace Analytics.

4. FUTURE: Statement Of Direction 

If you want insight into the future of AskCody and the themes we are prioritizing in our roadmap, check out the Statement of Direction. If you have any wishes for the future focus of our platform, please reach out to let us know.