v1.2.0 — Email Redesign, Exhibition Commerce & Registration

Released: September 2026  |  Version: v1.2.0

What Changed For Your Team

v1.2.0 is a consolidation release with three new surfaces on top. It takes the parts of ema your team uses every day — the emails your attendees receive, exhibition sales, registration, and your commercial records — and makes them hold together properly at scale, then extends ema onto the venue floor, into Outlook, and into the meetings your team is already having.

The largest single body of work is email. Every default email ema sends has been redesigned, and your branding now reaches all of them. Until this release, your organization's header, footer, and brand colour reliably reached only the emails your team had built a template for. The confirmations, invoices, reminders, and notifications that make up most of what your attendees actually receive arrived plain — no header, no footer, no brand colour, and often no button to act on. That is fixed, with no configuration on your part. Subject lines have changed on most registration emails; the full before-and-after list is in Detailed Changes.

The second is exhibition. Booth inventory, entitlements, cancellations, contracts and fulfilment previously each tracked their own view of what an exhibitor had bought. They now run through one model, so cancelling an exhibitor releases their booth, revokes their portal access and reverses their allowances in one action rather than three that could disagree. Exhibitor meetings can finally be switched on, and exhibitors get a file library you control.

Your commercial records become yours to shape: custom fields, record types and field-level permissions now apply across companies, contacts, deals and quotes, so the data you actually track no longer has to live in a notes field or a spreadsheet beside the system. Registration has been redesigned around the order people actually complete it in — the registration form first, then add-ons, with guest forms on their own step instead of crowded onto the review page. A group manager can now hand any seat's form to the person sitting in it rather than chasing twelve colleagues and typing the answers in themselves.

Those three surfaces put ema on the venue floor, inside Outlook, and into the meetings your team is already having. On-site, slides a speaker uploads are turned into a deck ema can play in the room, on an ePoster screen or in a browser, and every screen you put out — check-in desks, ePoster panels, signage — is paired and watched from one Device Fleet page. The in-room software behind it has had a long list of show-stopping defects removed: black projectors, silent failures, a clicker stolen mid-talk. In Outlook, the add-in stops being a filing shortcut: file a whole conversation, raise a task from the email in front of you, ask the assistant, draft a reply from what ema knows, or raise a support ticket without leaving the pane. Meetings from your Microsoft 365 calendars arrive with their recording, a searchable transcript, and a brief that names the decisions with the quote behind each one.

Finance gets a long correctness pass. The paths money takes through ema were audited end to end and the wrong numbers corrected, your chart of accounts becomes yours to number, staff labour reaches the ledger, and a new Posting Health page answers the one question that matters: is there money recorded in ema that has not reached the accounts?

Several areas changed behaviour in ways worth knowing before you upgrade. The two that will reach you first: an exhibitor item nobody has priced is now refused rather than sold for nothing, which affects the three unpriced template tiers every project was created with, and a project's currency is now fixed once anything is priced in it. Exhibitor cancellation is genuinely destructive of access and allowances, every floor plan — existing ones included — is now public only once published, theme settings that previously saved without effect now take effect, and money amounts in emails are formatted for an Australian reader. Read What You Need to Do before you upgrade — it is longer than usual this release.

Highlights

One Design Across Every Email

Every default email is now built from the same design: a white card on a light grey backdrop, a rule across the top in your brand colour, your logo — or your organization's name if you have no logo — in the header, one consistent left edge down the whole message, and a light footer carrying your real contact details.

Where an email has something worth doing, it now has a button. Where it carries money, dates, or a reference, those sit in a panel tinted to match the situation — green for a confirmation, amber for a deadline, neutral for a statement of fact — with the number that matters set large enough to read at a glance.

Order tables, payment instructions, refund details, and registration summaries were all rebuilt to match, and now read correctly on a phone rather than scrolling sideways.

Your Branding Reaches Every Email

Your brand colour flows through the top rule, buttons, links, and highlight panels on every email ema sends — your own templates and ema's standard confirmations alike. Links are darkened automatically where your brand colour would otherwise be too pale to read, so they stay legible on white without you choosing a second colour.

Your designed header and footer now wrap ema's standard emails too, not only templates with Use header & footer turned on. If you have not designed one, those emails carry a band in your brand colour with your logo instead.

Several cases where branding silently failed to arrive are fixed:

• A project's own brand colour now reaches emails sent for that project. Previously a project-branded event sent in the organization's colour.
• Broadcasts now send in your brand colour. Previously every broadcast sent with neutral dark buttons regardless of your branding.
• Turning Use header & footer off no longer strips your brand colour along with the header and footer. It now controls the header and footer only.
• Body links in the default emails now use your brand colour rather than body text colour.

Starting Layouts in the Email Builder

A new template now opens on Start from a layout: six ready-built shapes — Confirmation, Action required, Invitation or offer, Status decision, Financial notice, Certificate or record — plus Blank.

Each arrives as a complete draft with a heading, body copy, a details panel, and one button, already on the standard design and already carrying your branding. The placeholder copy is written to tell you what belongs in each spot, so the work left is the writing rather than the structure.

Preview a Registration Email in Every State

Registration templates that adapt their wording to a registration's state now have a Lifecycle preview panel. Pick a status — confirmed, declined, cancelled, awaiting payment, transferred, and the rest — and the preview re-renders with the copy, panel colour, and button that status produces.

Previously the only way to see the cancellation wording of a confirmation template was to cancel a real registration.

Warnings Before a Template Goes Out Broken

Two new checks in the builder:

• Personalisation fields that will arrive blank. If a template or subject uses a field its template type does not supply, a warning lists every one. Those render as empty text in the recipient's inbox, not as an error. Saving asks you to confirm once, so a deliberate choice still goes through.
• Missing image alt text. An image with no alt text is flagged in its settings panel. Screen readers announce alt text in place of the image, and most inboxes show it while images are blocked — which is most inboxes, on first open.

Emails You Have Not Written Are Now Visible

The template list previously showed a row for every email type, most of them containing only the words "Configure this template to match your needs." Those rows are gone. Nothing stopped sending — those emails were always sending from ema's standard design; the rows were placeholders nobody had filled in.

Instead, tick Show system defaults above the list. The label carries a count, and each email running on the standard design appears with a System default badge and a Customise button that opens the builder with the type already chosen.

The distinction matters: an email on its system default keeps improving as ema improves it and always carries your branding. Once you customise it, it is yours to maintain.

Add to Calendar

Confirmation and approval emails now carry an Add to calendar row with Google, Outlook, and Apple / ICS links. The event's time is written in the event's own timezone.

One Model for Exhibition Commerce

Everything an exhibitor buys — booths, sponsorship tiers, meeting slots, staff passes, listings — now runs through a single fulfilment path. In practice that means the numbers stop disagreeing with each other.

Cancelling an exhibitor now does the whole job: their booth returns to inventory, their portal access ends, their entitlements are withdrawn and their staff lose their booth grants. Tier changes recalculate what the exhibitor is owed rather than stacking a second set of allowances on top of the first. Booth holds are visible to support staff, so "who is this booth being held for" has an answer.

Exhibitors can be sold from the same product catalogue as everything else, and contracts for exhibition sales are generated by the same engine as your other contracts — one place to change your terms, not two.

The Public Exhibitor Checkout, Rebuilt

The checkout an exhibitor or sponsor buys through has been rebuilt from the ground up, and it is now the checkout on every event.

The package, add-ons and stands a buyer configures are held and priced by ema rather than added up in their browser, so the total and tax on the review step are the authoritative figures and the order raised is built from the cart the buyer actually approved. Discount codes carry through to the order, so a buyer is billed the discounted amount they were shown. Payment, contract signing and waitlist promotion all run on the same cart.

Every booth on a floor plan is generated as a sellable catalogue product, so stands and packages price from one place — and the floor plan, the stand picker, the package builder and the cart now quote one figure rather than four. Abandoned carts expire on a timer you set, release their stands automatically, and warn the buyer first.

Quote and contract emails across the whole lifecycle — sent, accepted, declined, expiring soon, superseded — are branded and overridable per event, replacing the plain notices that preceded them. The executed contract notice now links the signed document instead of asking the counterparty to contact you for a copy.

An item nobody has priced is now refused rather than sold for nothing. That is a real change in behaviour and it needs a few minutes of your time before you sell anything — see What You Need to Do.

Custom Fields and Record Types

Define your own fields on companies, contacts, deals, quotes and more, and group them into record types so a Sponsor and a Supplier can carry genuinely different information while remaining the same kind of record.

Fields support formulas that calculate from other fields, and a full change history so you can see who altered a value and when. Field-level permissions let you expose a field to some roles and hide it from others — useful for commercially sensitive figures that should reach your sales team but not your volunteers.

Saved views can be built on your own fields and shared with colleagues.

Redesigned Registration Flow

Registrants now complete the registration form before choosing add-ons, which matches how people expect to book and means their answers can drive what is offered to them.

• Add-on guest forms get their own step rather than crowding the review page.
• Add-on selection can be embedded directly inside a registration form, with conditional logic controlling when it appears.
• Single-choice add-on groups swap with one click instead of requiring a deselect first.
• Registration pages can be branded with full-width banner and footer images.
• Access-code entry now appears above the Continue button, where people look for it.
• Eligibility can be driven by form answers, so a question in the form decides which registration types someone can pick.

Group Seats Your Attendees Fill In Themselves

A group manager no longer has to chase twelve colleagues for their dietary requirements and then type the answers in themselves. Any named seat's registration form can be handed to the person holding it: ema emails them their own link, and the roster shows Attendee completes details against that seat until it is in.

• Links can be reissued, and Send outstanding claim emails goes to every seat on the roster that has not had one yet and has an address to send to. Seats still missing an email address are skipped and reported back as a count, so check that number rather than assuming the whole roster was covered.
• A seat can always be taken back, so the manager fills it in instead. It is handing a seat out that closes once the attendee has claimed it.
• The group can check out with delegated forms still outstanding.
• The control is offered only where it can work: not on an unclaimed placeholder seat, and not on a registration type that collects no form.

Each group now carries a seat activity trail — minted, claim invite sent, link reissued, claimed, directly assigned, released, captain changed, form handed over, form taken back — so "what happened to this seat" has an answer without asking the people involved.

Alongside it, group discount offers can be limited to specific access codes, so a negotiated rate appears only to the people who arrived through that code, and a registration type can be made reachable only through a qualifying offer — hidden from the public catalogue and the waitlist. Captains pick the discount tier they are aiming for up front on clear intent cards, the seat count pre-fills, and the total card reconciles subtotal, discount, tax and group total rather than showing the pre-discount figure.

ema in Outlook

The Outlook add-in stops being a filing shortcut and becomes somewhere your team does the work. From the task pane beside any email or meeting they can:

• File the whole conversation to a project — full message bodies, correct per-message subjects and senders, and replies your own team sent recorded as outbound, so response-time reporting is right. ema pre-selects the likely project and says why, usually because another message in the thread is already filed there or because of where that sender's mail usually goes.
• See and create project tasks, including a task raised straight from the email in front of them.
• Ask the assistant about the email, its project, or anything in ema, with formatted answers, a stop button, and per-answer copy and insert actions.
• Draft a reply from what ema already knows, with the sources it drew on listed, and insert it into an Outlook reply. Where there is nothing to quote, it now writes an acknowledgement you could send today plus the questions someone needs answered — rather than giving up.
• Rewrite their own draft — improve, shorten, expand, change tone, restructure — with one-click undo.
• Turn an email into a support ticket in a chosen support inbox.
• Read a meeting's transcript, see its insights and attendees, and turn suggested action items into tasks.

Shared and delegated mailboxes are supported, and the pane now works at its narrowest width instead of clipping its own buttons.

Notes and Actions From Your Meetings

Meetings from your Microsoft 365 calendars flow into ema end to end. A recorded meeting arrives with the recording playable in ema and a searchable, speaker-labelled transcript with click-to-seek timestamps. ema transcribes the recording itself where it can, and falls back to the Microsoft Teams transcript where that is what exists; either way the transcript says which it came from.

Every meeting with a transcript gets a Brief: what was covered, key topics, the decisions made with the exact quote behind each one, suggested follow-ups, and the meeting's tone. Click a quote's timestamp and both transcript and recording jump to that moment. Action items can be turned into tasks with the owner already filled in, and a recurring meeting carries the previous occurrence's summary and still-open actions into the next brief.

Your staff get a Calendar meetings page in their own portal listing the meetings they organised or attended, and a notification when a meeting's notes are ready.

Talks and sessions get the same treatment — summaries, key points and notable moments on the attendee session page, in the mobile app, and on a speaker's own talk pages — but off by default, behind a per-project switch, with a per-talk and per-session override. Organisers can also generate per-day and per-track event digests.

Presentations That Play Anywhere

When a speaker uploads slides into a slideshow content slot, ema now converts them into a deck it can play in a browser, on an ePoster touchscreen, or in the room.

Project > Submissions & Reviews > Presentations lists every talk's deck with a cover thumbnail, build status and slide count, so a poster session with ninety uploads can be checked at a glance rather than opened one by one. Watch any build in audience or presenter view, read the full build history with its error and warning counts, and recompile a deck that failed.

Playback behaviour — autoplay, slide timing, animation and transition, navigation, whether video and audio start on their own — is set once per surface under Project > Settings > Playback Defaults, and overridden on the odd deck that needs it.

A slide that fails to draw no longer freezes the show: the bad element degrades to a placeholder and the deck keeps advancing, including on an unattended kiosk. Speakers' private notes are no longer reachable from an ePoster kiosk.

One View of Every Screen on the Floor

Project > Devices > Device Fleet is where every check-in desk, ePoster touchscreen and signage panel is paired and watched.

Pair a machine with a one-time code that expires in ten minutes, optionally pre-assigning what it will show so nobody has to touch it. The list shows which devices are online, when each was last seen, what it is displaying, which badge printer is attached, and which version it is running.

Forty machines racked the night before can be paired in one pass and assigned the next morning from a laptop. Rename a device to match where it stands, flash it to identify which machine is which when several look alike, choose which monitor it opens on, set an overnight on/off window, and unpair it when the show is over.

Exhibitor Meetings

Exhibitor meetings can now be enabled for an event. Exhibitors get a meetings tab in their portal to manage requests, and organisers get an oversight view of every request across the event.

Meeting-slot allowances are scoped per exhibitor, so a sponsor tier that includes ten meetings grants exactly ten. A meeting booked as in-person now requires a location rather than silently confirming as virtual.

A Guided Path Through the Product

New and returning staff get a structured onboarding path: outcome-based journeys grouped by phase and filtered to your event type and your role, each one chaining the documentation that teaches it.

Alongside it, previously undocumented areas are now covered — accommodation, the public-site builder, the support portal, custom fields and tenant settings — plus orientation guides for reviewers, delegates and project team members.

Detailed Changes

Subject Line Changes

Most registration subject lines have changed. Nothing about how the emails are addressed or delivered has changed — only the wording recipients see in their inbox list.

Email	Previous subject	New subject
Registration Confirmed	Your registration is confirmed — {{eventName}}	Registration confirmed — {{eventName}}
Registration Awaiting Approval	Your registration is awaiting approval — {{eventName}}	Registration received — awaiting approval for {{eventName}}
Registration Approved	Your registration has been approved — {{eventName}}	Your registration is approved — {{eventName}}
Registration Declined	Your registration was not approved — {{eventName}}	Registration update — {{eventName}}
Registration Cancelled	Your registration has been cancelled — {{eventName}}	Registration cancelled — {{eventName}}
Registration Invoice Issued	Invoice issued for your registration — {{eventName}}	Invoice for your registration — {{eventName}}
Registration Credit Note Issued	Credit applied to your account — {{eventName}}	Credit applied to your registration — {{eventName}}
Registration Payment Reminder	Payment reminder for your registration — {{eventName}}	Payment due — {{eventName}}
Registration Refund Issued	Refund issued for your registration — {{eventName}}	Refund issued — {{eventName}}
Registration Payment Reversed	Payment reversed — action required — {{eventName}}	Action needed — payment reversed for {{eventName}}
Registration Add-on Confirmed	Add-on confirmed for your registration — {{eventName}}	Add-on confirmed — {{eventName}}
Registration Add-on Approved	Add-on approved for your registration — {{eventName}}	Add-on approved — {{eventName}}
Registration Add-on Declined	Add-on request not approved — {{eventName}}	Add-on request update — {{eventName}}
Registration Add-on Invoice Issued	Invoice issued for your add-on — {{eventName}}	Invoice for your add-on — {{eventName}}
Registration Tier Changed	Your registration has been updated — {{eventName}}	Your registration has changed — {{eventName}}
Registration Transfer — Outgoing	Registration transfer update — {{eventName}}	Registration transfer — {{eventName}}
Registration Waitlist Offer	Waitlist update — {{eventName}}	A place is available — {{eventName}}
Registration Account Created	Your account has been created — {{eventName}}	Your account is ready — {{eventName}}
Registration Change Request Outcome	Update on your registration change request — {{eventName}}	Your change request — {{eventName}}
Registration Abandoned Cart	Your registration is still waiting — {{eventName}}	Complete your registration — {{eventName}}
Registration Completion Reminder	Complete your registration — {{eventName}}	Finish setting up your registration — {{eventName}}
Custom Template	{{subject}}	A message from {{organization.name}}

These subjects are unchanged: Registration Add-on Cancelled, Registration Confirmed (Manager), Registration Approved (Manager), Group Registration Summary, Registration Transfer — Incoming, Registration Claim Token, and CPD/CE Certificate Ready.

If your team has customised any of these templates, your own subject is untouched. The table describes the standard design only.

Email Copy Corrections

• Declined registrations no longer state that no payment has been taken as fixed text. The amount paid is shown from the record instead, so a declined registration that did take payment is described honestly.
• Abandoned cart now says plainly that returning requires the same device and browser, and that held places are released and current pricing applies after the hold expires.
• Waitlist offers show one expiry deadline rather than two conflicting ones, formatted in the event's timezone.
• Custom Template opens with plain starter prose rather than a personalisation field that could never be filled in.
• No redesigned template closes with "reply to this email" any more — that goes for the standard registration and order emails and for the starting layouts in the builder. Where your organization has a contact email, the closer names it; where it does not, the line is omitted rather than left dangling. A few notification emails outside the redesign — speaker content reminders, quote expiry, and finance invoices — still word their closer the old way.

Reply-To and Sender Name

• Replies to a template with no reply-to address of its own now go to your organization's contact email address, rather than to an unmonitored no-reply address.
• Emails now show your organization or event name beside the sending address in the recipient's inbox, rather than a bare address. Names containing a comma, an accent, or other non-English characters are now encoded correctly in the header.

Payment Links in Emails

• Invoice and payment-reminder emails now carry a Pay now button. It appears only when the recipient can actually pay: the order is payable, an amount is outstanding, and the person receiving the email is the purchaser.
• For a registration on a payment plan, the button now opens the specific instalment the email is about, rather than initiating payment for the whole remaining balance. The page names the reason when an instalment cannot be paid yet — for example, an earlier instalment is still outstanding, or the instalment is not due until a stated date.

Email Accessibility and Rendering

• Emails are sent light-only. Inboxes offering a dark theme are told not to recolour them, so a design no longer arrives with inverted or unreadable sections.
• The unsubscribe footer on marketing broadcasts now matches the message above it, and its text now meets the contrast standard for body text.
• Plain-text versions of emails no longer contain run-together table values, stray characters, or leaked preview text, and carry one link per button.

Email Builder Fidelity

The builder canvas now matches the sent email on typeface, spacing, colours, and columns. Specifically:

• A columns block set to two columns now sends two. Previously it previewed as two and sent three.
• Vertical alignment chosen for a columns block is now applied when sending.
• A button with no link set is flagged in the builder rather than sending as a dead button.
• The Preview tab and the Export and Copy HTML actions now render with your brand colour rather than neutral dark.

Exhibition and Exhibitors

• Exhibitor resources: upload files for exhibitors to download, with typed uploads, a create-and-edit dialog, and delivery over the content network for fast downloads worldwide. Available in the mobile app as well as the portal.
• Booth staff access and roles — grant named staff access to an exhibitor's portal with defined roles, rather than sharing one login.
• Booth inventory integrity: booths cannot be double-allocated, and repointing an entitlement to a different booth keeps inventory consistent.
• Exhibitor payment receipts are issued automatically.
• Cancelled and deleted exhibitors are removed from public listings and the app.
• Resource-upload permission gaps closed, with the same guards applied to showcase uploads.
• Exhibitor search in the mobile app is usable, with honest pagination and parity with the web portal.
• Lead capture on mobile now survives a full event day of offline and intermittent connectivity, with lead data export and deletion controls.
• Exhibitor people management is one thing. The separate Contacts tab and the member list buried in the edit form are replaced by a single Team tab that works the same way the exhibitor's own portal does — add someone, grant or revoke their portal access, and see invitations that were sent but never linked to an account, which are now repaired automatically.
• The exhibitor portal has been unified: every tab follows one pattern, duplicated pages are merged, deep links land on the correct tab, and discussions are available on the exhibitor's own pages. Alongside it, dozens of smaller corrections — current tier and status shown and clearable when editing, a change request you can correct from the rejection, branding and access saves confirmed, readable labels in place of raw internal values, booth staff no longer shown controls they cannot use, and keyboard focus returning properly when a dialog closes.
• From an exhibitor's own page an organiser can now see what they bought and what they owe, their booth allocation, their change requests, their tasks with attachments and completion stats, which assigned content they acknowledged, whether their meetings are actually booked, and their branding. Seat management moves onto the exhibitor itself, exhibitors can reorder their own lead-capture questions and edit their own social links, and payment methods become a per-event choice.
• Exhibitor registration entitlements — author and gift what each exhibitor's package includes and track fulfilment, with the exhibitor's own portal showing their seats and complimentary add-ons at parity with group registration, so an exhibitor manages their team the way a group captain does.
• An exhibitor tier's base price, currency and capacity limit are editable on the tier form. All three were read by the checkout and the sold-out and waitlist logic but could not be set anywhere.
• Whoever pays at the public checkout now gets portal access to the exhibitor they just bought — previously their portal was empty until an organiser granted access by hand — and answers they gave on the checkout forms land on the exhibitor record once the order settles rather than being stranded.
• Seat actions only an exhibitor's owner can perform are hidden from other team members instead of failing with a permission error, and the errors that remain are written in plain language. The person who bought the package is reliably recognised as the owner, so an exhibitor can no longer end up with nobody able to manage its seats.
• Content acknowledgement tasks are created for exhibitors who had already started a checklist when you add new content to it, not only for those who start afterwards.
• A failed load on an exhibitor's resources, showcase, team or reasons-to-visit list now says the request failed, instead of stating the exhibitor has none — which read as fact and invited someone to re-add records that already existed.
• On events that had never had their commerce settings opened, exhibitors saw no add-ons and no stand upgrades and were refused if they tried to buy. Both now work from the standard defaults.

Exhibitor Sales and Checkout

• An event can point at its own price list for stands, so two shows can sell the same stand size at different prices without duplicating the catalogue. A price list now overrides only the stands it names and lets everything else fall through to your standard catalogue — previously one override made every other stand in the event unbuyable.
• A stand a buyer has already been quoted is no longer re-priced at the moment of payment. If the figure would move, checkout stops and says so rather than charging a different amount.
• A stand included in the buyer's package carts at zero on the picker, the embedded floor plan and the package builder, not only in the checkout step — where the other three quoted a price above what was actually charged. A stand taken beyond the package allowance still pays its own price.
• A discount code entered in the cart carries through to the order, and is re-checked against its caps, per-buyer limits and validity window at checkout.
• Accepting one option on a multi-option quote releases the stock and stands the other options were holding. Every multi-option quote previously shrank your available inventory permanently by whatever the buyer did not take.
• Cancelling or expiring an order returns only the inventory that order actually reserved, rather than units belonging to somebody else's live reservation.
• Every route to a tier change — an exhibitor upgrading themselves, an organiser approving a change request, a free upgrade taken at checkout — now checks the target tier's capacity. Upgrades run through the normal cart and their orders are fulfilled, so an upgrade can no longer charge for add-ons that are never granted.
• When an exhibitor declines a contract at checkout, the order and the stands it holds are extended together, using the signing window configured for that event rather than a fixed seven days.
• A booth product whose size class was left blank is treated consistently as the catch-all for that stand type, and duplicate entries such as 3x3 and 3 x 3 are rejected when you save rather than becoming two competing prices.
• Reversing an upgrade order no longer cancels the exhibitor's whole participation — it reverts the tier change it made.
• Add-on prices print as real money in the right currency. A $9,900 add-on that read as $990,000, and euro or yen amounts labelled in dollars, are fixed.

Presentations and Playback

• A funnel chart on a converted slide no longer draws its stage labels across its own bars.
• Decks left running on a hidden or background screen keep auto-advancing, and slides no longer flash before a transition.
• On-site, a deck whose images have not yet arrived from the cloud is re-asked for on a schedule instead of playing with placeholders indefinitely. The on-site cockpit shows that status per deck in plain language with a re-ask action, and the green room wall shows the same status read-only.
• The pre-flight deck check no longer advertises three checks that had been removed and were never run — font embedding guarantees, strict file-format conformance and high-resolution image slimming. The checks for active content now report embedded controls, embedded objects and macro-run links, and the metadata-removal check also clears custom properties, review comments and the preview thumbnail, so a cleaned deck can no longer still name its author.

On-Site, In-Room and Kiosks

• The projector no longer goes black when you switch to the holding screen, and the holding and recovery screens carry your branding instead of an empty black panel.
• If the presentation application is killed mid-talk, the room is recovered onto the deck it was on rather than left showing the desktop. Replugging a projector moves the output, capture and overlay windows back where they belong instead of orphaning them onto the wrong screen until a restart.
• A projector assignment follows the actual monitor rather than the port it was plugged into, so a cable swap cannot silently send the show to the operator's screen. Two clients can no longer run on one machine and fight over the projector.
• The projector mirror can now actually be seen by the audience, and recovers instead of staying stuck after losing its capture. Overlay cards sent to the projector appear. The operator alert panel no longer steals the clicker and keyboard from a running slideshow.
• The appliance clears old content off its disk, so a multi-day congress no longer fills the drive until a deck fails to download — while the file currently on screen is protected from being cleared. Downloaded slide imagery is held within a storage limit, and a deck that could not be stored says so.
• Pressing play on content that has not finished downloading tells the operator why, and an update can no longer restart the machine after a deck has gone live mid-download.
• The prep station shows a real error with a working Retry instead of exiting silently when it cannot reach the appliance. The room list shows a distinct "cannot reach the on-site server" state instead of looking like an empty venue, and operator actions the server rejects are reported rather than appearing to succeed.
• An organization paired onto a running appliance gets its content sync and upload going immediately instead of at the next restart, and the appliance's schedules survive a restart. An appliance stays in setup mode only until it is activated, rather than until someone restarts it.
• The appliance installs and starts entirely from its own media, with no internet connection and no credentials needed at the venue.
• On a kiosk, every remaining route out to the Windows desktop is closed — holding the Windows key, the accessibility shortcuts, Sticky Keys — and the service lock-out survives a restart. A kiosk set up with a mistyped workspace address returns to setup instead of stranding itself on an error page, and kiosks now write a log file so a machine that misbehaved at a venue can be diagnosed.
• The projector's live question-and-answer and poll feed from the cloud connects, which it never could.
• The on-site and kiosk screens are translated across six languages.
• The on-site client, kiosk shell and diagnostics tool ship as properly versioned, installable packages, each with its own product identity, rather than as loose executables. The on-site client and the diagnostics tool update themselves from a release channel; the kiosk shell is installed and updated by hand. The installed on-site client no longer crashes on launch and no longer needs a separate runtime installed on the machine first.

Streaming and Recordings

• A recording is confirmed to exist in full before it is treated as done, and "verified" now means ema has checked the file is there at the expected size rather than that something claimed it was. A recording is no longer judged the instant a stream ends, so footage that lands shortly afterwards still counts.
• Capture recovers if the recorder dies mid-talk, declares any gap explicitly, and copies each segment off the venue machine to durable storage with an integrity check — so "do we have a complete copy of that session" has a definite answer, raised during the event rather than after it.
• A recording survives its streaming channel being deleted, and is settled before an operator deactivating a channel can release it.
• Recordings are matched to the right session and schedule slot by identity rather than by overlapping clock times, so a busy room with back-to-back talks attaches each recording to the correct talk.
• Someone is alerted if recording data stops arriving part-way through a talk, and the operator is told why a channel has no ingest address instead of being shown a blank.

Networking Meetings

Attendee-to-attendee networking meetings — separate from exhibitor meetings — had a broken request lifecycle: requests could end up in states they could not leave. The lifecycle is repaired, so requesting, accepting, declining and cancelling behave consistently.

Organisers get a new oversight view listing every networking meeting request across the event, which makes it possible to answer questions about who is meeting whom without asking the attendees involved.

If you run attendee networking, expect meeting states to behave correctly now where previously some requests could become stuck.

Registration and Attendees

• Attendees can reach their orders and contracts from their portal, and request a fresh signing link when one expires.
• Refunds are capped against the specific payment they refund, and repeat partial refunds are allowed.
• Instalment orders no longer generate duplicate invoices, and stranded draft invoices can be voided.
• Registrants who are not members can be opted in to earn playback credit for recorded sessions, off by default.
• Check-in records a complete and correctly attributed audit trail.
• Registrants paying by card now receive an invoice and a receipt, matching what registrants paying by invoice already received.
• Consent for session recording is now kept as a full history — including changes made on the attendee's behalf by an organiser — so you can show who consented, when, and through which route.
• Multi-select questions, add-on pages and richer validation options are available in registration forms.
• Registration types can be marked in-person, virtual or both, and can carry which event days they are catered for. Add-ons can be flagged as catering items and made a required question, so attendees answer "attending?" per seat before continuing. Virtual-only registrants are left out of name badges — the badge actions are hidden, they are excluded from template samples, and the self-service kiosk declines them with an explanation.
• Transfer fees. An event can charge a fee when a registration is transferred to someone else, set as a flat amount or a share of the registration. The attendee reviews and pays it as part of the transfer — by card, bank transfer or invoice, inheriting the original registration's method where there was one — and the claim link stays closed until it is settled. Organisers can waive the fee on a transfer they make themselves.
• Eligibility rules gain a scope: apply a rule to certain access codes only, to everyone except certain codes, or to everyone, with the code-free public path counted as an option of its own.
• Form fields can carry their own help text, shown under the field to the person filling it in. Add-on visibility is now set separately from complimentary grants, so you can restrict who sees an add-on without also giving it away.
• Appearance controls for the wizard: choose how add-on tiles are laid out (masonry, uniform grid, or a full-width list), make registration type tiles equal height, add your own content above the access-code step, override the heading and sub-heading on the type, add-on and review steps, and show the type list as a grid or as one row per type. Registration type images sit flush to the top of their card, and type cards show a visible selection dial so attendees can tell they are clickable.
• Registration types can be shown or hidden per registration path — individual, on-behalf-of, or group — and that visibility is now a purchase rule rather than only a display filter, so a hidden type cannot be bought through a path it was hidden from.
• Attendees can be sent to your own confirmation page after checkout, with a validated return link.
• Phone fields can be given a default country and show a dial-code picker.
• Add-ons on the add-ons step are grouped into per-day sections, and long "included" labels wrap instead of overflowing their card.
• A lapsed waitlist offer passes the seat to the next person instead of retiring it. Previously opening an expired offer link took the seat out of circulation for good while the item still showed as sold out — for registration types, add-ons, packages and room allocations alike.
• Attendance and credit settle correctly on events that never had explicit session attendance settings. Attendees stayed checked in to finished sessions indefinitely and their credit never settled.
• Registrant identity now lives on the attendee's account rather than being copied onto each registration, so a corrected name or email reaches messaging, search, segments, badges and reporting at once. Each registrant page carries a history of who changed what and when, and organisers get an alert and a navigation badge when change requests are waiting.
• "You already have a registration" refusals now say what is actually blocking, and the on-behalf-of step can be submitted when the signed-in account's name is a single word.
• The attendee-facing transfer banner said a transfer was awaiting organiser approval when it was waiting for the recipient to claim it.

Group Registration

• Discount offers can be scoped to access codes. Narrowing an offer later keeps the price for groups already on it, and deleting an access code warns you which eligibility rules and offers it would break.
• Offer-gated registration types. A type can be made reachable only through a qualifying group offer — hidden from the individual catalogue and the waitlist. Captains add attendees straight onto the type their offer grants, checkout enforces the offer's seat band with a plain-English refusal, and an organiser approving a cancellation is warned when it would drop a group below the band it committed to. The gate can be set from either the registration type form or the offer form.
• The add-member pickers in both the organiser and attendee portals list only the types that group's own offer allows, and a group that has already paid cannot be switched to a discount band its purchase cannot support.
• The group name a captain types is kept, rather than being overwritten with their organization's or their own name.
• The group discount banner appears on events whose discount tiers are all scoped to a single registration type — captains previously saw no discount while checkout charged one.
• Group members who are not the group manager can no longer see the group's order and payment schedule.

CRM, Quotes and Contracts

• Contract audit history is append-only and protected at the database level.
• Signer identity is recorded per contract version rather than per contract.
• Signing consent is captured, signer tokens are never exposed, and removing a signer can no longer trigger automatic execution.
• Quote and contract numbers are issued from the true highest number in use, closing a gap that could reuse a number.
• Quote expiry, tax and currency rules are enforced on older quotes as well as new ones.
• Price-book entries and bundle items show product names and codes rather than identifiers alone.
• Contracts board supports pagination for events with large pipelines.
• A quote now shows who is buying — customer, contact, currency, customer tier and price list — where before it showed no buyer at all. Customer tiers are something you author and pick rather than free text, targeted price lists reach the buyers they were written for, volume breaks fire, and changing the tier, price list or buyer re-prices the lines you have not hand-edited.
• Fee lines can be billed as a percentage of expenses, per delegate, or as a markup, and a deal converted into an event carries its own revenue and client-money settings rather than being forced into a preset.
• A quote records which event it belongs to at the moment it is accepted, so reminder emails, expiry notices and the contract issued from it consistently carry that event's branding and settings.
• Documents can be held against an organization, not only an event, and an executed contract can finally be downloaded from the contract itself — the file existed but there was no way to retrieve it.

Comments

• Comments Explorer — one searchable place to see every comment thread across an event, filtered by what it is attached to and by whether it needs your attention, with each thread showing its subject and a link straight to the record.
• Comment notification emails send reliably, are batched, are scoped to the right organization, and respect each person's mention preferences. Previously one comment on a record with no page to link to stopped the whole email going out.
• Clicking through from a notification lands on the record with the conversation open. Many pages had no way to show the thread the recipient was emailed about, so they arrived at the right record and could go no further.
• Opening a thread from the explorer no longer refuses access when the conversation spans several events and the one it is filed under is not the one you hold access to.

Microsoft 365 and Outlook

• Meetings sync from your Microsoft 365 calendars, with recordings playable in ema — including a part selector where a call was split into segments — and speaker-labelled transcripts with click-to-seek timestamps and voice-profile name matching.
• The Microsoft integration page gains Test Connection, which reports exactly which Microsoft permissions are granted and which are still missing, a Sync now button, and a panel showing last full sync, last incremental sync and subscription counts. Enabling or disabling the integration takes effect immediately.
• SharePoint setup gains a Refresh for sites and channels, and a channel already used by another project is shown as such instead of silently failing.
• Recurring meeting series keep syncing to the last occurrence, notifications resolve to the right occurrence, late-arriving transcripts are picked up rather than lost, deleted meetings stop appearing in search and in the assistant, and one organiser's licence problem no longer affects everyone else.
• Meeting notes say who wrote them, and the transcript shows whether it came from ema's own transcription or from Microsoft Teams.
• Attachment uploads from the add-in work reliably, including messages carrying a signature image; retries no longer create duplicates, and a genuinely missing file reports "not found" rather than an error.
• A filed item carries an explicit Open this email in ema or Open this meeting in ema link, instead of a link wearing the project's name.
• An already-linked meeting no longer briefly shows as unlinked when the pane opens, which could create a duplicate link if you clicked in that moment.
• Sign-in works for Microsoft app registrations left on their default token setting, so a newly provisioned organization works out of the box.
• Email bodies are withheld from the assistant for anyone not permitted to read email, even with project access, and a filed email cannot be discovered from another workspace.

AI

• Generated event digests can be read in place — summary and highlights, expandable — rather than only listed.
• The admin talk page gains an insight panel with summary, key points, a plain-English explanation of why something is or is not visible, and a regenerate action for those permitted to use it. Talk and session edit forms gain a hide AI content switch.
• Sessions recorded as one long file produce a proper summary for each talk inside them, sliced at the talk boundaries marked on the recording, with timestamps that seek correctly within the session recording. Talks without a marked segment are skipped rather than approximated.
• Chapter summaries and highlights respect your AI settings: turning AI off for a project, organization or tenant genuinely stops them. Quoted highlights are checked word-for-word against the transcript and dropped if they do not match.
• Regenerating a summary works for talks inside a session recording — previously the very talks the feature exists for were refused — summaries are cleared when a talk's boundary is removed, and re-running after a boundary change no longer silently does nothing.
• When ema could not reach the AI service while refining where a talk starts in a session recording, every boundary quietly fell back to the scheduled time with nothing reported. Those failures are now surfaced.
• AI Defaults — set the house tone and guidance ema's AI follows for content, support replies and email replies once, at organization or workspace level, instead of each project lead re-typing it. A project with its own AI settings always wins.
• The assistant could disclose organiser-internal discussion — talk accept and reject rationale, exhibitor compliance notes, internal comment volumes — to invited exhibitor and client portal users. Internal channels are now withheld from everyone outside your organising team.

Sign-In and Directory Sync

• Directory groups can be mapped to access roles, so people arrive with the right permissions automatically. Removing someone from the directory now removes their membership and ends their active sessions rather than leaving an empty account, and an organization can no longer be left without an owner.
• Roles an administrator assigned by hand are no longer withdrawn when a group mapping is removed, and roles the directory granted are reliably withdrawn when it revokes them. Each grant records which directory gave it, so two directories connected to the same organization cannot undo each other's work.
• Enforced single sign-on is applied consistently across web and mobile.
• Sign-ins last up to a year of continued use across the mobile app, the web portals and the Outlook add-in, so returning to an event months later does not mean starting from scratch. Nobody is signed out by this release.

Public Pages and Privacy

• Public session listings, the public schedule, related sessions and exhibitor-sponsored sessions were serving every field of the session record to anonymous visitors, including the check-in code, internal notes, meeting and recording identifiers and who last edited it. They now carry only the fields intended to be public.
• The public event landing page was serving the entire event record to anonymous visitors, including accounting sync codes, CRM identifiers, the project manager, the workspace email header and footer, and a storage reference for a featured video that may be access-restricted. It is now limited to an explicit list of public fields.
• Internal organiser comments — talk accept and reject rationale, exhibitor compliance-override reasons — were being served to any signed-in attendee, and attendee notes from the public event pages were landing in the organisers' Internal tab. Attendee comments now have their own public channel, and talk, speaker, session and exhibitor pages gain a Public tab so organisers can read and moderate them.

Financial

• A substantial accuracy and compliance pass across the ledger, tax handling and reporting: figures that appear in more than one report now reconcile, tax is modelled correctly for Australian requirements, and period-close rules are enforced.
• Invoices carrying goods and services tax push correctly to your accounting integration, and unsupported operations fail loudly instead of silently doing nothing.
• A dedicated write-off permission, so writing off a debt is a deliberate, separately granted action with an audit trail.
• Exhibitor commercial configuration changes are recorded in an audit trail.
• Payments are linked to the invoice they pay, restoring correct void and chargeback handling.
• Currency conversion for returned surplus is fixed to the accounting day.
• Supplier invoices can be read automatically from a PDF or photo, extracting supplier, amounts and line items for review.
• Custom reports exclude deleted records by default.
• A scheduled bill can be disputed, which holds its remaining instalments while the dispute is open rather than continuing to charge against it.
• Chart of accounts codes are editable, including the standard accounts ema seeds. Renaming or renumbering an account no longer breaks posting, because ema identifies an account by the role it plays rather than by its code. The code remains the label on documents and in accounting syncs.
• How a project accounts for its money is now two explicit choices: the revenue basis — the full event value as your own revenue, or your fee only — and where client money is held: not held, in your operating account, or in trust. Existing projects carry over unchanged. ema offers only the combinations it can account for correctly, and explains the two it does not yet support. A project can now recognise the full event value while holding client money in a segregated trust account, which previously could not be selected; your own money and genuine client money in the same trust bank are tracked separately so reconciliation stays clean.
• Staff labour posts to the ledger. A cost is recorded when a timesheet is approved and the recovery when that time is billed, so unbilled and written-off time is visible as cost carried. Past recoveries are replayed, so the history is complete.
• Payment and refund records carry your payment provider's own reference, the provider's fee, the amount net of that fee, the settlement amount and currency, and the date it settled — all selectable in the report builder, so finance can tie an ema order to the payout it arrived in. Credit note numbers are available as a report field too.
• Posting Health — a page under a project's Financial area listing anything recorded commercially that has not reached your ledger, with how long it has been waiting and a way to retry it.
• The accuracy pass above traced each path money takes through ema and corrected what it found. Figures that could previously be wrong: credit notes exceeding what an invoice actually charged, revenue recognised twice or stranded on deferred lines, staff time recovered from a client budget being reported back to that client as their own cost, supplier payments settling at a different amount from the one approved, and exhibitor quotes taxed on the wrong rules. Approval controls are tighter too — a supplier bill dispute cannot be raised and cleared by the same person, and automatic approval cannot bypass an organization's two-person rule.
• Credit notes are bounded per invoice, taking amounts already written off into account, rather than against the order total alone — a part-invoiced order could be credited for more than any invoice had charged.
• An incoming payment no longer lands on an instalment already written off as bad debt, which left the genuinely outstanding instalment unpaid. Re-writing off an invoice after a previous write-off was reversed now opens the new relief correctly.
• A project must always have a valid default tax rule. ema refuses to delete, expire or re-date a tax rate that would leave a project without one, repairs projects already in that state, and treats "No Tax" as an explicit zero rate rather than the absence of a rule. Project copies no longer arrive without one.
• Every order records the tax rules, jurisdiction and exemption status it was priced under, so later actions read them back instead of re-deriving them from settings that have since changed. This closes a case where a card surcharge recalculated a total to include tax while recording zero tax against it, and one where accommodation orders on tax-inclusive projects contradicted their own totals.
• Add-on purchases made by exhibitors from their portal were charged without tax. They are now taxed on the project's rules, in the project's currency. An exhibitor cart is priced before anyone signs in, so checkout now compares the pre-tax total — a tax-exempt buyer is no longer blocked from converting their cart, and the cart says tax is calculated at confirmation.
• Quote lines for a catalogue service or standard product recorded no income against the project budget when the quote was converted. The charge went through correctly; only the budget entry was missing.
• Orders on events created before currency settings existed were silently missing from booked, billed, collected and outstanding figures in receivables reporting. All orders are now counted, each in its own currency.
• Every money figure in reports, exports, emails and accounting syncs carries the currency it is in, so mixed-currency data is never presented under one symbol. Several places previously fell back to Australian dollars where no currency was stated, which for zero-decimal currencies such as yen scaled the figure by a hundred — quote totals and lines, registration and add-on price tiers, exhibitor package and tier prices, the exhibitor cart subtotal, and the tier-upgrade screen, where the price shown could be a hundred times the real one. A figure whose currency still cannot be determined shows a dash rather than a guess.
• Optional payment-provider fees were rounded differently from the totals beside them on the same document. Both now use your organization's rounding rule.
• A change of a project's owning organization arriving from your project management integration is refused and reported when the project holds financial activity, rather than silently moving its invoices, bills and ledger into another company's books. Every other field keeps syncing.
• Accommodation commission and hotel settlements now use different bases — see What You Need to Do.
• A buyer returning to a checkout link that had lost its order total was shown "No Payment Required" with a confirm button on a chargeable order. The total is re-read from the order, and nothing is stated about what is owed until it resolves.

Floor Plans

• Safer editing in the designer, with honest delete and undo behaviour, explicit published state, and layers and views.
• Public floor plans no longer expose personal information or internal sales-desk fields.
• Exhibitor panel loads up to 500 exhibitors, and renaming an object refreshes the plan immediately.
• A plan is visible to the public only once it is published. Plans were previously served to anonymous visitors from the moment they were created, mid-layout, including stand positions and pricing zones. Unpublish is now a real action — and so is Publish, which many teams have never needed to press. See What You Need to Do.
• An exhibitor's own booths and meetings pages no longer depend on the public map being live. They were showing no availability and "No booth assigned" for exhibitors who had one, because organisers routinely place exhibitors before publishing the attendee map.
• The page editor shows live booth availability for a plan that is not yet published, so an exhibition page can be built and previewed without exposing the unfinished plan.
• Listing the objects on a floor plan no longer fails when only the plan is named.

Communications and Branding

• Email branding cascades from tenant defaults down to individual projects, with guided setup.
• Slack notifications can be delivered as direct messages using a workspace-wide default, with per-organization channels added on top rather than replacing it.
• Marketing text messages send from a registered Australian long code.
• Several images that appear on public-facing pages could be rendered but never set from the admin. They are now editable where they are used, so you no longer need to work around a placeholder you could not replace.
• Theme controls that previously saved but had no effect — secondary colour, input border, letter spacing and shadow settings — now change the public event site as expected.

Team, Tasks and Time

• Timesheets in the Me portal have their own screens end to end, and time can be logged without granting access to the deal it belongs to.
• Overdue and due-soon dashboard tiles link through to the matching task list.
• Task forms reject submissions whose project does not match the task's project.

Additional Improvements and Fixes

Email

• Each sent email now records which template and which version of that template produced it, so support can answer "which version did this person receive" during a period when some templates have been customised and others have not.
• Comment notification emails now go through template resolution, so a template you create for them is actually used. Previously they always sent from the standard design regardless.
• Four email types have been deactivated: nomination confirmation, nomination approved, nomination rejected, and general event invitation. Nominations and general invitations are not yet available in ema, so these emails could never send. None of the four appear when creating a template. Their designs are retained and will return with the features that send them.

Navigation and layout

• Record tabs are no longer hidden by nested page layouts.
• The duplicate Approvals entry is gone from the Me portal sidebar.
• The admin sidebar split between organization and project navigation is resizable.
• Pages load faster: heavy editing and export features load only when opened.

Settings and forms

• The "Public navigation brand" setting no longer resets after saving.
• Integration settings confirm when they save instead of failing silently.
• Text, email and phone fields no longer default to a web-address placeholder.

Records and lists

• Opportunity lists no longer crash on records with a close date.
• Deadlines on several time-limited records can be extended after creation.
• Waitlist offers record their full lifecycle timestamps.
• Error messages no longer leak internal record identifiers.
• Vendor onboarding no longer strands suppliers with an empty checklist, and compliance dates are tracked correctly.

Attendee experience and mobile

• Video captions and livestream publishing fixes.
• Mobile push notification registration fixed.
• Signing in to the mobile app no longer hands you off to a web browser: you sign in once and the app takes you straight into your event. It finds the organizations and events you belong to on its own, so no organization code is needed, it remembers your email address between sign-ins, and phone sign-in appears wherever your organization allows it.
• The mobile app recovers quietly in the background instead of dropping you back to the organization list and losing your place.
• The offline pack now actually includes your profile, which was missing whenever the app had no connection.
• The session detail and question-and-answer screens announce loading state and back buttons correctly to screen readers, use proper headings, and read in the user's own language rather than English.

Settings that did not match what ema used

Several screens showed a default that differed from the value actually in effect. All now show the real setting.

• Networking profile retention displayed 90 days against an actual 365.
• Registration cancellation requests displayed as off when they were on.
• The mobile app offered code-based check-in on events that did not accept it, and hid the wallet-pass card while passes were being issued.
• Opening an event's portal settings for the first time could permanently create a half-configured portal — features such as ePosters appeared to attendees even though they were switched off, and the switch reported the wrong state. Portal settings now start from the proper defaults.
• Leaderboards on events with no explicit gamification settings appeared to be running but never awarded points or updated.

Two of these are worth acting on — see Check Two Settings That Were Showing the Wrong Value.

Errors, saving and reliability

• Any error the platform returned to the web app or the Outlook add-in was replaced with a generic unavailable page, so the browser reported it as a connection problem and the real message was lost. You now see what actually went wrong.
• Saving from the document template designer and the email builder could fail with an unexplained connection error whenever the content was large or contained styled text. Those saves go through.
• Four notification emails carried buttons that led nowhere — the contract-executed notice, a form notice, a submission notice, and the welcome email's sign-in link. Every email action now lands on a real page.
• Work already running when ema is updated — payment reversals, imports, scheduled housekeeping — was interrupted and failed. It now finishes before the update completes.
• Accommodation blocks on a public event page reported an error when no accommodation catalogue had been set up yet. They now simply show nothing until one exists.
• Recording a manual payment against an invoice can no longer be submitted without a payment method, and the dialog stops clearing what you have typed when the balance refreshes.

Permissions and the Me portal

• The project role editor listed organization-wide permissions a project role can never hold, so Grant All produced a role that failed to save with a raw error. Those rows are shown locked with an Organisation tier badge and excluded from Grant All and the counts.
• Task tiles and document cards in the Me portal are clickable again — tasks open their detail view, documents download.
• Organisation members with tasks assigned in their organization's events but no direct event assignment saw an empty My Tasks list. They now see their tasks.

Getting started

• A guided product tour is available for the Exhibitors area.
• Empty product areas now explain what they are for and link to the first action, instead of showing a blank screen to someone opening them for the first time.

What You Need to Do

This section is longer than usual. The first three items can stop a sale going through, so read them before you open exhibitor or registration sales, and Publish the Floor Plans You Want the Public to See decides whether your floor plans appear on your event website at all. Most of the email work needs nothing from you — your branding is already applied and every email already sends — but the last three items are worth ten minutes each.

Price Your Exhibitor Tiers Before You Sell

This is the item most likely to surface as "our checkout stopped working".

A price of nothing recorded now means price on application, not free. An exhibitor package, add-on, stand or tier upgrade that nobody has priced is refused at checkout and reads Request a quote on your public pages, instead of being sold for nothing.

That matters because every project is created with three template tiers — Exhibitor, Sponsor and Exhibitor & Sponsor — carrying no price and no currency, for an organiser to fill in. Until this release those tiers sold at a zero total, which provisioned the exhibitor, granted every entitlement and reserved their stands with no payment step.

Before you open exhibitor sales:

1. Open your exhibitor tiers and give every tier you intend to sell a price.
2. Do the same for add-ons and for any stand whose catalogue entry has no price.
3. A deliberately free item must be priced at zero. Zero still sells; blank does not.

Nothing is filled in for you, deliberately — ema cannot tell the difference between a tier you meant to give away and one nobody has got to yet.

The Rebuilt Exhibitor Checkout Is On Everywhere

The rebuilt public checkout was previously enabled per event, and an event with no commerce settings read as off — which was most of them. It is now the checkout on every event, and an event has to be switched back explicitly to get the old one.

Two related points:

• A negotiated quote on the new checkout now fails with a clear message rather than silently re-pricing off the catalogue.
• A checkout claiming to be free is accepted only when the total is exactly zero. A positive-total free request previously created an order nothing could settle while it held the tier's stock.

Check your exhibitor payment methods. They are now a per-event setting, and an event that never configured one falls back to offering card and invoice only. Bank transfer is carried over automatically for any event that has actually taken an exhibitor bank transfer — but an event that advertised bank transfer and never landed an order on it will lose that option until you switch it back on.

Set a Project's Currency Before You Price Anything

Each project now sells in exactly one currency, taken from its financial configuration. The separate Currency field has been removed from Registration Settings — registration, add-ons, upgrades and transfer fees all follow the project currency.

Two consequences:

• A project's currency is frozen the moment anything carries a real amount in it — a priced registration type, add-on, package, stand, hotel rate, entitlement, fixed discount or surcharge, a payment plan, a deal, or any order, invoice, bill, purchase order or expense claim. Set the currency when you create the project. If you try to change it afterwards ema refuses and names what is holding it, so work from that message rather than guessing. Items priced at zero and anything expressed as a percentage do not hold it.
• Copying a project into a target that sells in a different currency is refused, rather than carrying the source's prices across with the wrong currency attached. Re-price deliberately in the new currency.

Action required on one case: where a project's registration currency previously disagreed with its financial currency, a fixed registration transfer fee has been switched off so it cannot be charged in the wrong denomination. Re-enter the amount in the project's currency and switch it back on. Percentage-based transfer fees are unaffected.

Your Reporting Currency Is Now Fixed

The workspace-wide reporting currency used for consolidated figures across projects is now fixed and shows as read-only. Changing it never re-stated historical figures, so a total spanning the change was adding two currencies together and presenting one number. If yours is not the currency you want to consolidate in, raise it with us rather than looking for the setting.

Publish the Floor Plans You Want the Public to See

A floor plan is now served to the public only when its status is Published. Until this release the public pages ignored that setting entirely and showed every plan from the moment it was created — mid-layout, including stand positions and pricing zones — so most teams have never had a reason to press Publish.

Check each of your live events' floor plans and publish the ones the public should see. A plan left in draft will not appear on your event website, in the public stand picker, or in the attendee map. Nothing is filled in for you, since ema cannot tell a finished plan from one still being laid out.

Unpublish now does something too — use it to take a plan back off the public pages without deleting it.

Replace Your On-Site and Kiosk Installs

If you run the on-site client, the kiosk shell or the diagnostics tool on venue machines, replace those installs with a build from this release — earlier installs crash on launch. From this release the on-site client and the diagnostics tool keep themselves up to date from a release channel; the kiosk shell still has to be updated by hand.

An on-site appliance should be re-imaged from the new media, which installs and starts without an internet connection at the venue.

Three smaller notes for anyone with a checklist:

• Three deck pre-flight checks are gone from the check list — font embedding guarantees, strict file-format conformance, and high-resolution image slimming. They were never actually running, so nothing regresses, but remove them from any pre-event checklist that names them.
• An appliance now holds a bounded amount of downloaded slide imagery. A very large poster programme may need that limit raised.
• ePoster kiosks no longer hand out the original uploaded slide file, so anyone relying on downloading it from a kiosk loses that.

Approve ema's Microsoft Permissions

The Outlook add-in works entirely on the signed-in person's own permissions, but those permissions have to be approved in your Microsoft 365 directory before the pane can read a mailbox — reading and writing mail for filing, attachments, drafting and convert-to-ticket, and reading calendars for linking meetings. If your team works from shared or delegated mailboxes, the shared equivalents are needed too. If nobody has approved them, the pane now shows the directory it needs approval for and a button to approve it, either for the whole organization or for one person.

Background calendar, recording and transcript sync needs a wider set of organization-wide permissions than was previously documented. Reading Teams recordings and transcripts additionally requires an access policy granted per user — without it the permission is approved and the calls still fail — and a Microsoft administrator can disable transcript access outright, which ema cannot work around.

Use Test Connection on the Microsoft integration page: it reports exactly which permissions are granted and which are still missing.

Decide Whether Attendees See AI Summaries

AI talk and session summaries are hidden from attendees until an administrator turns on Show AI summaries on attendee surfaces in the project's portal settings. Meeting briefs for your own team are on by default, and can be switched off for a project or a whole organization.

Microsoft 365 Copilot meeting insights have been removed from ema. ema's own brief replaces them as the single source, and Copilot-authored insight text previously stored in ema has been cleared. Teams with a Copilot licence still get Copilot's notes inside Microsoft 365 — they simply no longer appear here.

Check Two Settings That Were Showing the Wrong Value

Two settings screens displayed a default that differed from the value actually in use, and both have a consequence worth checking:

• Networking profile retention showed 90 days while the real default was 365. If anyone saved that form, the shorter period was stored — and it purges attendee networking profiles early. Open it and confirm the number is the one you intend.
• Event portal features. Opening an event's portal settings for the first time could create a half-configured portal, so a feature such as ePosters could appear to attendees while its switch read "off". On any older event whose portal settings you have opened, confirm your feature switches say what you mean.

Re-Check Eligibility Rules That Read Form Answers

An eligibility rule that checks a form answer now reads only the forms belonging to the registration being bought — that type's registration form, or the event default, plus its approval form. Answers given on a different registration type's form no longer count, even when that form is a copy asking the same question.

If you have a rule that was matching answers from another type's form, it will stop qualifying those registrants. Walk your eligibility rules once before you open registration.

Attendee Comments Written Before This Release

Attendee comments now live on their own public channel, separate from your team's internal discussion. Existing comments are not reclassified, so attendee comments written before this release no longer appear on the public event pages. They are untouched and still readable by your team in the Internal tab and in the Comments Explorer.

Accommodation Commission and Hotel Settlements Will Move

If you book accommodation at all, expect your figures to change — whichever way you display room prices. Hotel commission now accrues on room revenue excluding tax, and the amount owed onward to a hotel settles on the full guest-paid charge including tax. Both previously used a single figure for both purposes, which overstated commission on tax-inclusive projects and understated hotel liabilities on tax-exclusive ones.

Reconcile your current hotel positions once after upgrading so the new basis is the one you are working from.

Exhibitor Cancellation Now Takes Effect Everywhere

Cancelling or deleting an exhibitor releases their booth back to inventory, ends their portal access, withdraws their entitlements and removes their staff's booth grants. Previously some of these were left in place. If your team has been using cancellation as a soft "hide this exhibitor" action, stop — it is now a real cancellation. Check your cancelled exhibitors before upgrading if you were relying on the old behaviour.

Theme Settings That Were Previously Inert Now Render

Secondary colour, input border, letter spacing and shadow settings were saveable but had no effect on your public site. They now apply. If you set these values at any point and never saw them take effect, review your event site's appearance after upgrading — values you forgot you saved will now be visible.

Check Your Exhibitor Entitlement Tiers

Tier changes now recalculate allowances rather than adding to them. Exhibitors whose tier was changed under the old behaviour may be carrying inflated allowances; review them and correct any that look wrong.

Re-Test Your Registration Forms

Because the form now precedes add-on selection, any form using conditional logic across that boundary should be walked through once end to end before you open registration.

A New Write-Off Permission Is Required

Writing off a debt is now gated on its own permission rather than general financial access. Grant it to the roles that need it, or those users will find the action unavailable.

Money Amounts Now Show a Currency Prefix on Foreign Currencies

Amounts in registration emails are now formatted for an Australian reader:

Currency	Previously	Now
Australian dollars	A$250.00	$250.00
US dollars	$250.00	US$250.00
Euros	€250.00	€250.00

Australian amounts lose the A prefix, and non-Australian currencies gain a short prefix so an attendee cannot mistake a US dollar amount for an Australian one. If you bill in more than one currency, expect a question or two the first time an invoice goes out — the amount has not changed, only how it is written.

Check Your Header and Footer, Then Send Yourself One Email

Because your header and footer now wrap ema's standard confirmations and notifications as well as your own templates, they reach a much wider set of emails than before. Two things are worth checking once:

1. Open Admin > Settings > Email Branding and confirm the header and footer read correctly for an email that is not a broadcast — a registration confirmation, say. A footer written specifically for marketing sends may want rewording.
2. If you used a personalisation field inside your header or footer, check it is one of the organization details — name, logo, contact email, website, address, or the current year. A header and footer are shared across every email type, so a field specific to one email arrives blank on the rest.

Then open any project's Email Templates, open a registration template, and use Send Test Email. That test send is the honest check on what your attendees will now receive.

If Your Team Customised a Default Template

Your customised templates are untouched — content, subject, sender name, and reply-to address all as you left them. They will not pick up the new design.

To move a customised template onto the new design, compare it against the system default first. Tick Show system defaults to see what the standard version looks like now; if it says what you need, deleting your template returns that email to the standard design and its ongoing improvements.