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v1.1.0 — Accommodation, Broadcast & Self-Service Kiosks

Released: August 2026  |  Version: v1.1.0

What Changed For Your Team​

v1.1.0 is the largest release since v1.0.0, and it extends ema into three areas teams previously handled outside the platform: accommodation, outbound communications, and self-service kiosks on the floor.

Accommodation is the headline addition. You can now contract hotel room blocks, manage per-night commitments and attrition exposure, and let attendees book their rooms from your event website — with the commercial risk visible to you throughout, rather than tracked in a spreadsheet.

Alongside it, the broadcast and audience engine turns your registration and exhibitor data into targeted email and SMS campaigns without exporting anything. Kiosks bring self-service check-in with badge printing and on-stand ePoster browsing to venue hardware. And for teams running the same event year after year, project cloning removes the setup work of starting from scratch.

Registration also gains per-seat guest forms and a controlled transfer workflow. If you use registration transfers, read What You Need to Do — the behaviour has changed.

Highlights​

Accommodation and Room Blocks​

Contract and manage hotel inventory directly in ema. Define hotels and room types, hold room blocks, and track your commercial exposure as bookings come in.

Per-night commitment grids let you set how many rooms you have committed to for each night rather than a single flat number, and sliding-scale allowances let you model tiered attrition terms. Your attrition position is calculated against the basis you actually negotiated, so you can see where you stand before the cutoff date rather than after it.

Attendees browse and book accommodation from your event website through a family of nine ready-made page blocks — hotel listings, room type detail, availability, and booking — with hotel and room imagery served through the same optimised image pipeline as the rest of your public pages.

Broadcast and Audiences​

Build reusable audiences from the data already in your project — registration status, ticket type, exhibitor status, session attendance — and send targeted email and SMS to them without exporting a list.

  • Send-time optimisation delivers each message in the recipient's own timezone, with a defined send window and the ability to cancel a scheduled send before fan-out begins.
  • AI-assisted drafting in the email builder turns a short prompt into a first draft, and refines existing copy in place.
  • One-click unsubscribe is honoured on marketing sends, meeting inbox provider requirements.
  • SMS supports opt-out by reply, with separate marketing and transactional sending so a campaign opt-out never blocks a booking confirmation.
  • Attendees manage their own communication preferences from their portal.

Delivery, opens, bounces and opt-outs are reported per send, and recipients who could not be delivered to can be exported for follow-up.

Attendee Check-In and ePoster Kiosks​

Two self-service surfaces for venue hardware.

Check-in kiosks run full-screen and let attendees find themselves and print a badge on the spot. QR scanning works with both handheld scanners and a device camera, and scan-and-print completes in a single step for the common case. Kiosks are configured from the admin interface, including a custom header banner.

ePoster kiosks let delegates browse posters on-stand. Presenters get engagement data back — views, ratings, questions and contact requests — and operators get a live health indicator showing which kiosks have checked in recently, plus an analytics dashboard across the estate.

Commerce on Your Public Pages​

A new family of commerce blocks brings the buying journey onto your event website and sponsor prospectus:

  • Build-your-package configurator — sponsors and exhibitors assemble their own package from available components and see the price update live.
  • Booth picker — select a stand from the floor plan as part of checkout.
  • Add-on marketplace and corporate packages.
  • Sponsor and exhibitor directories with an interactive prospectus.
  • Group registration and bring-your-team blocks.
  • Pricing displays that reflect your configured tiers automatically.

Detailed Changes​

Project Cloning​

Clone an entire project, or choose the modules you want. Programme, registration setup, tasks, engagement configuration and CPD/CE structures can each be brought across to a new project, so a recurring event starts from last year's setup instead of a blank slate.

Registration: Guest Forms, Transfers and Approvals​

  • Per-seat guest forms — collect details for every attendee in a group booking at checkout, not just the purchaser.
  • Intake forms are viewable and editable by attendees in their own portal.
  • Transfer approval — transfers can require organiser approval before they take effect, configured per event.
  • Category entitlements on registration types.

Breakout Rooms​

Meeting hosts can split a session into breakout rooms, announce to all rooms at once, see live rosters, let participants self-select where permitted, and return everyone to the main room in one action.

CRM and Quotes​

The CRM and quoting tools are now generally available rather than preview. Quotes carry real tax so the amount quoted is the amount invoiced, proposals generate as branded PDFs, and won deals can push to Xero so finance does not re-key them.

Slack Notifications for Operator Teams​

Slack now supports two independent install layers: the existing organization-level install for client-organization teams, and a new tenant-level install for operator staff whose notifications span multiple client organizations.

  • Install once for the whole tenant via Settings > Tenant Integrations > Slack — Tenant-wide (requires Integrations & Auth Admin or Tenant Full Access).
  • Both layers can route approval cards to their own channel. If both are configured, cards post to both.
  • Users connect their Slack account separately per layer from Me > Account. Connecting one does not connect the other.
  • Every notification type available at organization level now also works at tenant level: task assignments, approvals, comments, mentions, and financial and registration activity.

The same Slack workspace cannot be used at both layers at once — install at the level that matches where notifications should arrive.

Registration Access Codes​

The public registration wizard now shows a collapsed Have an access code? option on the registration-type step. Attendees with a private channel code can enter it directly instead of needing a specially constructed link.

A valid code unlocks the same catalog as a pre-built channel link — the relevant registration types, pricing and discount codes appear — and the state survives navigating forward and back through checkout. Unrecognised codes show an inline error and keep the field open; a valid code shows a confirmation with a Change code action.

Wallet Passes​

  • Project-level enable/disable — wallet pass issuance can be turned off per project from Portal Config > Features. It defaults to enabled, so existing projects are unchanged. When disabled, issuing or downloading a pass returns a clear message rather than a generic error, in both the Me portal and the mobile app.

Registration Fixes​

  • Add-ons stripped during a transfer are now disclosed to the buyer, and mid-transfer purchases are blocked.
  • Custom claim-form answers, including allergy and safety fields, sync back onto the registrant record after the claim flow completes.
  • Sold-out add-ons show the correct badge in the wizard even when the registrant is waitlisted.
  • Backward navigation through the wizard no longer corrupts state.
  • Invoices from lump-sum registration products now receive due dates, making them eligible for payment reminders.
  • Partial waitlist offers use the configured email template rather than the default.
  • Staff notification emails for form submissions by anonymous public visitors are delivered again.
  • The registrant CSV export includes form answer and consent columns.
  • Per-member Public pricing is reachable in the group registration flow.
  • Clearer messaging when membership verification is required.
  • Included add-ons correctly enforce exclusivity rules.

Financial Reporting and Accounting​

  • Date buckets in financial reports are reprojected to your tenant's local calendar day, preventing day-boundary shifts for tenants outside UTC.
  • Bill and expense-claim general-ledger entries always post at the exchange rate frozen at approval time, not a recalculated rate at posting time.

Payments and Integrations​

  • Stripe setup — the integration form now shows the exact webhook address for your project, which events to subscribe to, and numbered setup steps inline.
  • Stripe card payments — a regression affecting card payment confirmation on projects using platform Stripe accounts is resolved.
  • Membership sync — custom membership Party fields used for designation derivation are preserved during sync, so lookups no longer fail on records with non-standard field layouts.

Timezone Corrections​

  • Session times in the Me portal display in the project's local timezone rather than UTC.

Additional Improvements and Fixes​

Event operations

  • On-site preparation improvements: room-state derivation, authored holding slides, and clearer visibility of on-site status from the cloud.
  • Venue signage and holding templates gained authoring and validation checks.

Attendee experience

  • The mobile app gains ePoster browsing with rating, questions, contact requests and favourites, plus offline caching and deep links.
  • Deep-link onboarding takes attendees straight to the right screen.

Support

  • Attendees and organisers can raise support requests through a form in their portal.
  • AI chat can escalate a conversation into a support ticket with its context attached.
  • Response-time targets are visible on each ticket.

AI

  • The assistant can answer questions about CRM and quoting data.
  • Documentation search answers product questions in chat.
  • Automatic social-share images for public pages.

Email

  • Payment instructions, refund details and registration details now adapt to the recipient's region.

What You Need to Do​

Registration transfers now route through claim​

This changes existing behaviour. Transferring a registration no longer moves it to the new attendee immediately. The recipient is now sent a claim invitation, and the transfer completes only when they accept it.

Until they accept, the original owner keeps access to the registration. This prevents a registration becoming stranded if it is transferred to a wrong or unmonitored address.

What to expect:

  • Transfers are no longer instantaneous — expect a gap between initiating and completion while the recipient accepts.
  • If your event requires it, enable transfer approval so an organiser confirms transfers before the claim invitation is sent.
  • Attendees who report that a transfer "did not work" should be asked to check for the claim email first.

No action is required if you do not use registration transfers.

The previous magic-link sign-in mechanism has been retired in favour of authenticated claim links. Existing users are unaffected; any saved older sign-in link should be replaced by signing in normally.

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