Planner and Visitor - Updates and New Features

Every Cloud version contains various bug fixes reported by our customers and found by our developers.

If there is a specific bug you wanna hear about or you would like a status update on a bug please write or call our [email protected]

Visitor Reception - Scanning

Internal/External attendee categorization

-Bugfixes

“Meetinglist with participants” report

-Bugfixes

VSTO Add-In

Reports download and print

Planner Self Creation:

This is only enabled on Cloud.

Planner Self Creation Setup:

Since Microsoft has ended support for Office 2010, so have we. So it is no longer possible to download an AddIn to Outlook 2010 from Planner.

Planner will not reject any existing clients. When existing 2010 VSTO AddIns check for an update they will just be told that no update is available.

From this release there is no guarantee that the Outlook 2010 VSTO AddIn will work. Chances are that it will continue to work for some time, but if any changes are made to the AddIn that requires an update for it to work, then old AddIns will seize to work.

If at some point we learn that the discontinued support from Microsoft results in severe security breaches in the client we might chose to reject all traffic from those clients without notice, and then effective rendering them useless.

This note will then be visible in Visitor for the receptionist as shown in this picture.

The password reset flow has been redesigned.

The new flow works like this:

The major change from the previous flow is that we no longer send out a password in clear text and the password isn’t changed until the user actually decides change it.

9.169.0

This feature is only available for Global bookers.

Under "my settings" you can choose a preferred location. This location will work like your default location, so all new bookings will by default start on that location (you can still change location in the booking flow).

The site administrator can also enable a setting so that the last location you booked on will become your new default location.

An option to download the data used for a report as CSV has been added.

The option is available as a button above the report after it has been generated. The CSV data includes all the underlying date including some columns that may not be used in the report. This is done to provide a full picture of the data used for the report.

In the administration view where you can create new billing accounts, we have added a button so you can download a CSV file that includes all the billing information.

Some users have access to additional resources. If you have access to a VIP resource, then it will be marked with a crown to let you know that is isn't something every user has access to. This is to reduce confusion when some users can book resources that others can't.

If you type in the wrong credentials 3 times in a row rapidly, you will be asked to wait a few minutes before trying again. This makes brute force attacks against the site difficult.

Notification buffer in Visitor

In our previous generation of Visitor we had a function where you could buffer your Visitor notifications. That functionality has returned.

When a large number of visitors arrive at the same time this can result in many notifications being sent to the host. A configurable buffer has been added so multiple emails are not sent when visitors arrive at the same time.

The setting can be found under "Visitor" -> "Visitor Notifications"

During implementation and testfaces we have disabled the email notifications for our customers. This functionality has moved into Planner so they can disable all email notifications from Planner themselves. We recommend that it is only done in testing faces, to avoid users missing crucial notifications - such as a meeting room having been cancelled from their booking.

It is done under "Settings" -> "Email"

It is now possible to disable or enable Planner email notifications, Visitor email notifications and Visitor email notifications on specific users. We generally recommend that notifications are enabled, but you might experience situations where they need to be disabled. By default they are enabled, and you can change them unser "Users" and pressing the pencil on the user. If you scroll to the bottom you see these buttons:

We have made changes to how Planner and Visitor handles passwords to improve security.

The AD import no longer gives a password, so new users have to choose "forgot password" to get an auto generated password.

Users can't change their password to the 200 most common passwords - this includes 123456. Any user who already has one of these insecure passwords will still have that password, so we recommend changing it.

Added new booking history entries when a booking is deleted after being moved to a conflicting time-slot.

You can now add more than two languages to a Visitor selfregistration. This also means that you can make a NDA and GDPR for each language.

To support the GDPR rules, we have added automatic cleanup of inactive Guests and Attendees. You can pick how long the Guest or Attendees should be inactive before they are removed, or disable it all together. This is done under Settings -> Meeting settings

It is now possible to see latest meeting activity for any given user in the system. The activity overview can inform administrators on whether to delete them, or if there has been abuse of a users account.

It is now possible to add or move multiple users to the same company.

It is now possible to disable the option for “partly booking” of resources, so that resources must be booked for the full meeting duration.

It is possible to download your meeting rooms and catering resources as a csv file.

It is now possible to print your catering menu

It is possible to set a Commodity Group Id either globally (for all service charges) or for each service charge.

To set the Commodity Group ID globally,

To set the Commodity Group ID for each service,

You can now hide all your product prices and easily reveal them again in the future.

Why is this important: We have talked to a lot of companies that wishes to embrace a culture of trust and self-autonomy with regards to the purchasing of catering. They want to nudge their employees to buy whatever they find fit for their meeting and not worry about the cost. When hiding the price from the booker, the ordering is still associated with a cost and billed as normal.

How to:

To hide your product prices, go to

Administration > Meeting seetings > Booking Prices

Prices will be hidden from the booker but visible in all reports.

You can now see the reservation ID of a booking on the check out page of that booking.

Why is this important: In some cases – and this is especially true for bigger meetings/arrangements – the meeting owner and kitchen manager need to do some additional planning. By exposing the reservation ID for the booker, the kitchen manager can search for the ID and quickly identify the right booking, making communication much better.

How to:

If you wish to see the reservation ID of a specific meeting, go to

My Calendar > Find and click on a meeting >

It is now possible to pull a report that shows not locked bookings within a period.

Why is this important: Get a quick and actionable overview of bookings that have not yet been billed, before month-end closing

How to: To pull a report of not locked bookings, go to

Administration > Reports > Select Report

It is now possible to add “tax” as a global setting, thereby disposing VAT in price label for catering table and in checkout/my calendar/email notification

Why is this important: Before, unless the booker knew about the VAT arrangement, she would not know whether the booking cost was with or without VAT. With the new description, booker always knows the total cost of a booking.

How to: Add tax as a global setting, go to

Administration > Settings > Meeting settings > Bookings Prices

You can now unlock locked bookings that have not yet been exported.

Why is this important: Before, if a booking had been locked, it was not possible to make any changes to that booking. With the new changes, you can unlock all bookings that have not yet been exported to your finance system, so that they can be edited and relocked for export in case of any errors.

How to: To unlock a locked booking, go to

Administration > Bookings

Find the booking you wish to unlock

It is now possible to edit the booking.

The filter that decides whether a guest is internal or external has been expanded. You now have 3 options to choose from, ensuring a more versatile Planner experience and a better integration with Visitor.

The attendee picker has been updated with a new look and the option to show an Alternate hostname on your Visitor badge, making life easier for your receptionist.

The help button has been moved to be more accessible. Don't forget to fill out the contact information of your system administrator!

We have created a new and improved view for those managing other peoples bookings. It's a big feature, so it's explained in this guide: Planner-Scheduling-assistant-feature

If your booking doesn't cost anything, you won't be asked to fill out a Billing Account for your booking.

Deleted users are anonymized in the database, so that all personal information is removed in compliance with GDPR.

This feature is limited to those with the Secretary right in Planner.

You can find the user you want to book on behalf of in the dropdown box.

Then you get a view of their calendar, so you have a better idea of when they are available for bookings.

In Planner it is possible to have a meeting room for a meeting without having the meeting room for the entire span of the meeting. To ensure the users are aware that they have made a partial booking, we have added a large confirmation boxs for when they book in Planner.

We have introduced a new left side panel within the My Calendar - introducing both a calendar for easier navigation, a section showing your next 5 upcoming meetings and a section showing how many hours of meetings you had last week vs. this week.

Planner now works with both iOS and Android - offering the users full access to all the booking options, room/catering/equipment from your favorite mobile phone.

The Visitor Boarding Card lets you send information to your visitors prior to the meeting - with information like how to get to the meeting (map and directions), general information like ex. parking or any other useful information helping the visitors arriving on time.

The Visitor Boarding Card can also include evacuation information in case of fire or GDPR information - any information that you see as important for your Visitor when they are to visit your company.

Room Cancellation notification

Planner's Room Cancellation Notification is a feature that will help you optimize the utilization of your rooms. When configured, you'll receive a reminder x days, weeks or months before the booking takes place. Helping you avoid possible "no-show" meetings

With the newest add-in, Planner now offers an add-in that works with Office 365 on Outlook 2016, Outlook Web Access and even on Outlook 2016 for Mac. It shows within Outlook as an important feature that enriches and simplify the search for the best room fitting your requirements.

Streamline the login page with a background image, logo and your own choice of text helping to welcome your users.

We now offer customers within our Cloud to retrieve and maintain users from the Azure AD. New users will automatically be created, old users will be deleted and any updates to users or their roles will be fed into Planner.

Keep it simple for your users and let them login with the Office 365/Azure credentials - if they are already logged into Office 365/Azure, then Planner will simply log the users into Planner without asking for another login.

(Singinsolutions will NOT store passwords - but will rely on SAML2.0 for authenticating users towards Office 365/Azure AD)

It is possible to select whether room costs should be calculated per booking or on an hourly basis for individual room resources.

My Calendar is a new way for users to get an overview of their meetings. Click here to learn more.

When users are rescheduling their meetings Planner checks the availability on the fly, so users are made aware of any issues right there in the booking flow.

We have redesigned the solution, so the users can take Planner on-the-go and access it from mobile devices. Click here to see more.

We have also redesigned our mail notifications, so they have a similar look and feel to that of the Check out pane in the booking flow. Click here to see our FAQ on the new mail notifications.

Resource owners are now able to restrict delivery of catering and equipment resources to specific rooms by editing the individual resources.

Resource owners are now able to make users unable to explicitly select certain catering and/or equipment resources for pick-up by editing the individual resources.

Should you forget to update the resource filter of the report you use with new resource categories, we will make you aware of it in the Resources tab in Administration.

We have made it easier for you to get an overview of the entire workday by focusing the Facilities time to span the workday hours as defined in Administration --> Settings --> Other settings.

We have implemented a message in case you filter away all the rooms in the list.

Instead of filling in the delivery note for each individual booking, you can now just fill in the note for the serving as a whole when the delivery note is required.

We've made it possible for Administrators to choose between four different background images for the Planner booking workflow. Just go to Administration, choose Settings and the Other settings. Here you'll find "Themes" where you can choose between the different layouts.

The previous red warning icon in Planner's Outlook add-in had a makeover to soften the visual voice of the "Important message".

We've added the new "Order summary" report type primarily to help kitchen and delivery personnel arrange servings individually. The order summaries can also be used as a ordering receipt for the booker to be delivered with their respective serving.

Catering may not always be available due to holidays and the like, so we've made it possible for the Catering manager to set up location-specific dates on which Catering is unavailable. Closing days can be set in the Administration. Go to Resources and it's found below the catering categories.

The Location selection has been moved out of the Filter to the top left corner of your booking workflow.

We've omitted the old Help-icon and replaced it with Help-tab in the right side of your booking workflow. System administrator(s) can now set up the contact information (phone and email) of internal Planner-relevant stakeholders as well as a link to a customized Help Page. Just go to Administration, Settings and choose Help settings.

Our new AttendeePicker and Guest Import features have been through a betatesting process and are now enabled for all customers.

The "Complete booking" button in Checkout has been made sticky to ma ke available to the user without scroll. The Checkout header color has been changed to avoid confusion as to its function. A [X] has been added for improved usability.

We have introduced support for changing recurrence patterns for meeting series in Outlook.

It is now possible for the Administrator to prompt users for a meeting title in the Planner workflow by enabling the new setting, "Meeting title is required", in Administration --> Settings --> Meeting settings.

The counter in the Attendees badge now accumulates named and unnamed attendees for the meeting.

The helpsite can be accessed directly from the Planner workflow if you need help.

The catering overview in your Checkout has been organized in servings, so you can easily see when you'll get the individual deliveries.

If you have made changes to a reservation and try to leave, we'll ask you to confirm. We just want to make sure that you don't have to start over again.

The date-picker, as we call it, now displays current date and selected dates to make it easier for you to navigate.

When you receive an email from Planner, we want to make sure that you can easily access the reservation. The reservation ID link is now a link directly into your reservation.

We also include your booking notes in the emails - for both you and the resource manager.

The notifications you get during a workflow have been reduced, and you now have the possibility of closing the notification box.

We've improved the overall usability of the filter.

The Exchange integration has been greatly improved.

We're continuously working on fixing bugs and improving the solution, so the listing above is only the tip of the iceberg.

Improved robustness and performance.

Import your attendees directly from Planner in the web booking flow.

Please note: This is not a default setting.The button is available and can be activated by Signinsolutions.

You can now add room descriptions with up to 255 characters.

Write as many comments as you like. There are no limits to the text length.

Counting attendees, room/catering resources, and equipment. These numbers give you an overview of your booking and the attached resources.

The timeline updates automatically when choosing a date/time slot in datepicker. The ‘Update’ button is now removed.

One log-in to all of your Office 365 related accounts - including Planner.

Please note: This is not a default setting. Planner can be set up to function with SAML.

*Technical requirements: Office 365 - Azure AD