What's New on andcards: Oct 2022

There's always something new happening at andcards, as we never stop working to improve the experience for our users. This time we're excited to share several significant additions we've been working on over the past month.

Now your coworking space app uses geolocation, which makes it even easier for members and guests to style up profiles. Besides, we speeded up the meeting room display, and now it updates in real time. What’s more, we enhanced Analytics performance, made our product even more refined in the back end, and laid the foundation for the next colossal feature our customers are looking forward to.

Without further ado, let's dive into October product enhancements!

 

1. Hints for Phone Numbers

Your customers and guests can finally stop guessing how to fill in the phone number field, the country calling code, and the format. Unlike other apps that force users to manually choose from a hundred or so calling codes, andcards intelligently hints at the country code right for the user.

• Apps use geolocation and device settings to give members a local country code.
• Users see an extra hint below the phone number field with an example phone number format for the region.
• The hint appears everywhere in the app, including the visitor display for guests.

 

2. Real-time Room Display

A meeting room display is an intelligent feature to display a room's status, quickly check in customers, and assist members with bookings.

Room displays must communicate with the server to know if a room is available or booked. Imagine being asked if a room is available every second—the server would melt! For optimum performance, the room display was updated every thirty seconds.

Our team upgraded the system to WebSocket API—an advanced technology that allows two-way interactive communication between the room display and a server. Now the server tells our room display whenever the room is booked or free and updates in real-time!

 

3. 10x Faster Analytics

Analyzing your coworking space performance is essential to make intelligent business decisions. andcards has easy-to-use tools for tracking payments, bookings, member engagement, and more.

What’s unique about andcards is our ability to show analytics in real time. It’s not easy to gather tens of thousands of data points across every module into a user-friendly and real-time dashboard.

For example, our meeting room booking report shows trends for the last six months. If you have a hundred bookings per day, that’s 18,000 data points! And that’s only one chart—we have dozens. Previously, it took many seconds to show such a report.

We have completely reworked the business logic and moved calculations to the cloud. This makes Analytics astounding 10x faster on some pages! It is almost unbelievable that tens of thousands of data points can be wrestled in a blink of an eye, but with andcards, even the most complex things are made simple.

 

4. Decentralized Microservice Architecture

Traditional centralized monolithic system architectures work well for smaller projects, reducing complexity and maintenance costs. They have one major flaw—the entire system is down if something breaks.

That is why our product team has invested most of our October time into decentralizing andcards architecture. We are gradually reworking our monolithic architecture into a beautiful constellation of microservices. This means several revolutionary advantages over the old-school coworking software:

• If one part breaks, it doesn’t affect the entire system.
• We can update individual modules independently without system-wide downtimes.
• The overall system is more resilient and scalable under heavy load (like when all your invoices need to generate and process payment simultaneously).
• Clean and stable code base, which is less prone to bugs.

Separating modules is extraordinarily complicated and laborious, and we will continue to do that in the coming months. This back-end improvement is “invisible” to end users, as the client interface remains predictably the same. You may only notice faster performance here and there as you navigate around your apps.

 

5. The Foundation for the Next Big Thing 

andcards coworking space software is evolving faster than anyone in the market. As soon as we release one big thing, like Notification Center for administrators, we start to plan another treat for our customers. Our engineers are planning 1:1 Chats that will take communication between members and admins at your coworking space to the next level.

Making complex things easy is something only andcards can do. Read Coworking Smarts to be the first to know of incredible new features we release in November.

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