Over the past three years, we've invested heavily in building key features into RICOH Spaces to ensure we can enable organisations to create a great workplace experience through changing circumstances and challenging periods. 

A year ago, we decided that our technology architecture needed to evolve to enable us to achieve our aspirations for RICOH Spaces. So we started our journey of building the next major version of the platform.

We are now coming to the end of our journey for RICOH Spaces V2 and ready to start showing our customers, so what were the main goals for our platform updates?

• Performance & Reliability
• Multiple Hosting Regions
• Web App Refresh
• A New Mobile App
• Reimagined Analytics
• Whats Next

Performance & Reliability

Beware, I'm about to get a bit technical! Our main driver is ensuring Spaces V2 is as fast as possible. Currently, the RICOH Spaces Client apps, such as the web app & mobile app, do all the hard work. However, working this way can mean slower laptops or networks see slowdowns in busy periods or significant office locations. We've solved this problem by building a large-scale GraphQL-based API.

We worked with experts from Apollo GraphQL to ensure we have the very best implementation within our API, together with Datatonic enabling us to build scalable cloud architecture and database experts at MongoDB, ensuring we have the best database technology.

Spaces V2 allows us to process massive amounts of data in the cloud, taking the load from the client machines and providing higher availability increasing overall reliability.

This updated approach will improve reliability and performance and allow us to have a better base to work from, ensuring we can deliver the features we want to provide over the next few months. We've also had the opportunity to course correct a few of our features along the way and make changes based on our customers' feedback.

RICOH Spaces V2 will utilise a microservice architecure.

"A microservices architecture is a type of application architecture where the application is developed as a collection of services. It provides the framework to develop, deploy, and maintain microservices architecture diagrams and services independently."

Multiple Hosting Regions

RICOH Spaces has been deployed to thousands of offices globally. Our new architecture enables multiple regions for data processing & storage. We'll be launching dedicated regions for Europe, USA & Asia Pacific. By default, customers will be migrated into Europe unless specified otherwise.

Web App Refresh

We launched our web application three years ago, and since then, we've made many improvements. With RICOH Spaces V2, we've decided to ensure we build back better. We've taken to core customer feedback and improved vital features. Including our floorplan now with full search and discoverability of colleagues, our room schedule is faster than ever. Our visitor module will simplify visitor management, and our new admin features will make the administration of your organisation a dream. Check out our Inside V2 series for in-depth overviews of what has changed.

A New Mobile App

We've to rebuild RICOH Spaces Mobile from the ground up as we want to ensure we deliver the very best mobile solution on day one and have a stable platform to build on for our significant updates released shortly after. We've more than doubled our native development team to ensure we can continue to deliver a great experience on all platforms.

Reimagined Analytics

One of the oldest areas of RICOH Spaces is our insight reporting; although it provides enormous value to our customers today, we felt this was a key investment area for us. For this reason, we've partnered with Google and implemented their Looker platform. Looker has enabled us to rethink our reports and ensure we're providing answers to the questions. In addition, Looker has enabled multiple new features, such as email delivery and exporting data into other systems. Finally, we'll release a new self-serve feature in the months following the Spaces V2 launch. Here you can build custom reports and publish them for your organisation.

Whats Next

We'll release more information about RICOH Spaces V2 in the next few weeks with specific timeframes and guidance.

1. We'll soon be releasing more technical information on how V2 is architected.
2. You'll get access to a test environment for Spaces V2, which is entirely separate from your live version. The test environment will enable you to utilise the features, provide feedback and ensure you're ready for your organisation to go live.
3. We'll give further guidance on timescales for the migration and release.
4. Your data will have a final migration from V1 to V2 on the specified date in a period of low usage.
5. Your employees will be redirected from the current URL to the new region URL.
6. The old platform will be decommissioned.