Joan

Joan provides meeting room booking and hybrid workplace software, distinguished by its e-paper room display hardware mounted outside meeting rooms, alongside desk booking and visitor management in the wider platform.

The e-paper hardware is what sets it apart and the choice is a considered one. A display outside a meeting room needs to show the current booking legibly all day, and a conventional tablet needs power, meaning either a cable run into a wall by a door or daily charging. E-paper draws almost no power, so a display runs for months on a battery and can be mounted anywhere with adhesive, which removes the electrical work that otherwise makes room displays an installation project.

That difference decides whether an organisation deploys them at all. Fitting screens outside forty rooms is an expensive job when each needs a power supply, and a trivial one when they stick to the wall.

The displays also solve the specific problem that booking software alone does not: someone standing outside a room needs to know immediately whether it is free, and expecting them to check an app to answer a question they are physically standing in front of is why rooms get taken regardless of the booking system, and why displays remain worth the hardware cost in an otherwise entirely software category.