A lot can happen in a year. A lot of products can be updated and released in a year, too.
In 2019, we released some of our most exciting products yet.
You’ve embraced our UI Elements to further streamline your development process and provide better scheduling to your users faster.
You’ve suggested ways we can further improve our core products, helping us to create the best scheduling solutions out there. And we’ve got plenty of exciting things to come in 2020 to help you do this even better.But for now, let’s take a look back. In no particular order, here are our biggest product updates and releases from 2019:
UI Elements
By far, our most significant release of 2019 was our UI Elements.These can be embedded into your website or application to provide your users with a simple scheduling interface.They’re fully customizable, meaning you can design them to match your branding and provide a seamless experience for your users.
Agenda View
With the Agenda View, users can see what they’ve got coming up for the day ahead.This is useful when embedded into HR applications as it allows users to see their schedule in the same place that they can connect with colleagues, schedule meetings, track progress, etc.
Slot Picker
The Slot Picker can be embedded into any website or application to allow customers or colleagues to book appointments with your users. We’ve seen customers embed it into chatbot flows to schedule interviews or follow-up support calls. It could also be embedded on marketplaces to allow customers to schedule appointments with vendors.
Availability Viewer
The Availability Viewer is a calendar view of someone’s schedule. Customers or colleagues can use it to see when the user is free and use this information to pick a suitable time to meet with them.
Availability Rules
Users can specify when they want to be available for meetings using Availability Rules. They can block out time for lunch breaks, deep work, or personal time. This ensures that nobody will be able to schedule a meeting with them during that time when using Cronofy.
Find out more about our UI Elements.
Bookable Events
Bookable Events allow you to track event registrations. You can use it to set event capacities, closing event registration once the maximum capacity has been reached. If someone cancels, a slot will re-open for someone else to book.
Read more about Bookable Events.
Availability API response formats
You can now choose from three different response formats from our Availability API. You can set it to generate slots that overlap with the start interval, non-overlapping slots of equal length, or contiguous available periods of a minimum length.
Read more about API response formats.
Availability Buffers
This ensures space is left between bookings when using our Availability API or Real-Time Scheduling. Your users then don’t need to worry about back-to-back meetings: they have time in between them to do any follow-up actions or prepare for the next meeting.It’s also useful for anyone who travels between appointments, such as a vendor or healthcare practitioner.
Add Availability Buffers to your software.
Available Periods
Your application can record fixed time periods where you want to make a user available for scheduling purposes.
Find out more about Available Periods.
Availability Rules
Allows the capturing of regular available hours for a person or resource.
Add Availability Rules to your software.
Batch Endpoints
Batch endpoints allow for multiple API transactions in one request. This is ideal when your application needs to add a set of events to a user’s calendar. Up to 50 transactions can be included in one call, allowing your application to perform the operation more quickly and avoid hitting rate limits.
Discover more about Batch Endpoints.
Conclusion
Phew, that’s a lot! Of course, we couldn’t have done any of this if we hadn’t scaled so rapidly this year. In the last 12 months, we’ve expanded our sales, marketing, development, and support teams. We went on our first company retreat to Mallorca. We’ve experimented with new ways of doing things to make our schedules smarter too. Above all else, though, we’ve spoke to you, our customers, to find out what you want. Our development process is influenced by what you need from us.
Got a suggestion for 2020? Drop us a line at hello@cronofy.com.
If you’d like to find out more about any of the above updates, you can check out our Docs site.