Every office has the same meeting-room problems. Two teams arrive for the same room at the same time. A room is booked all afternoon and empty. Nobody can find a free room for a quick call. Visitors wander the floor looking for “Meeting Room 3”. Joan is a room-booking system built around wireless e-paper displays that sit on the door of each room, and it addresses each of these directly. This article explains how it works and what it changes.
How Joan works
Joan connects to the calendar system the organisation already uses – Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or others – and reads the room calendars. Each room gets a Joan display on or beside the door. The display shows the room’s name, whether it is free or busy, who has it and until when, and the next bookings. Staff book from the display with a tap, from their calendar as they always have, from the Joan app or from a web portal. The displays are wireless, battery-powered and mounted with adhesive or a bracket, so installing one is a matter of minutes with no cabling.
The problems it solves
Double bookings disappear because the display and the calendar are the same source of truth: a room shows busy the moment it is booked anywhere.
Ghost meetings – rooms booked and not used – are handled by check-in. If nobody confirms at the display within a set time, the booking is released and the room shows free.
Finding a room is solved at a glance: a green display is free, a red one is busy, and the app shows every free room on the floor. For larger buildings, Joan’s wayfinding displays at reception and lift lobbies list availability.
Meeting overruns are visible: the display shows the next booking, and the occupants can extend on the display if the room is free.
Why e-paper
E-paper displays only draw power when the image changes, so a Joan device runs for months on a charge and needs no power cable. That is why it can go on any door, including glass partitions and pods, without an electrician. The displays are readable in bright light, have no glare and look like a printed sign rather than a screen.
Beyond rooms
The same platform books desks for hot-desking, with desk displays or app-based booking and a floor plan showing what is free. Visitor management – pre-registration, check-in at reception, host notification – is available on the same platform, and analytics show how rooms and desks are actually used, which is the data facilities teams need when planning space.
Deployment
- Connect Joan to the calendar system and map each room calendar to a display.
- Mount the displays; adhesive on glass, brackets on walls.
- Set check-in rules, booking limits and who can book which rooms.
- Roll out desk booking in a pilot area if hot-desking is planned.
A typical office of twenty rooms is live in a day. Ongoing administration is light: the displays report their battery level, and a charge every few months is the only maintenance.
Security and administration
Joan integrates with the calendar through standard APIs and supports the single sign-on and permission model of the calendar platform. Devices are managed from a central portal, with firmware updates pushed remotely. For organisations with strict network policies, the displays connect over Wi-Fi to the Joan cloud service, and on-premises options exist for specific cases.
Joan through Zen
Zen Interactive Technologies distributes Joan in the UAE and GCC, with room displays, desk devices and wayfinding units in stock in Dubai. We can size a deployment from a room list and supply the licences with the hardware. See the Joan page to start.