everyworks

Deutsche Bahn Station&Service AG has a large number of properties around their train stations across Germany. They now offer them as flexible office space and meeting rooms, so now the millions of daily travellers can benefit from a country-wide network of flexible workspaces and meeting rooms, and DB makes better use of their train station properties.

The core of the everyworks application is an invoicing and payments system, paired with customer management, a calendaring & booking system, admin user management, and an HTML email notification service. This allows everyworks admins to manage the available spaces, meeting rooms, and desks, schedule bookings and cleaning services, and to manage both customer accounts and their own staff’s access to the system.

The application was built with the traditional controller approach, but the more interactive parts of the UI were built using the then-new Phoenix LiveView. This technology allows us to write functionality on the server-side and have the UI update to reflect data changes in a highly-responsive way. It also brings a well-designed and full-featured component system to a backend language, meaning we can create an organised system of rich, encapsulated, and maintainable components.

Our backend team designed and built the GraphQL API that’s consumed by the everyworks mobile application. Through this, everyworks customers can make bookings and manage their accounts on their phones. Convenient and fast access to the reserved spaces is handled though an invite system, with QR codes generated and sent to each customer and their guests, that are scanned on arrival.

The application is deployed on AWS using Kubernetes, giving us a dependable application environment, lightening fast response times, and industry-leading uptime.

Customers interact with the service through the mobile app, and through HTML emails. These HTML emails contain their QR codes for each booking, are a always-reliable backup to the mobile app just in case, and provide a simple way for a customer’s guests to access the service without having an account. The emails are everyworks-branded, responsive, and tested on a range of 40+ email clients and platforms. They need to always work and look good, whichever device or email app the customer is using.

The product started by offering desk spaces available on a per-minute pay-as-you-go basis. Among other new features, we’ve added flat-price meeting rooms with multiple invited attendees, flexible prepaid minute-wallets, day passes, vouchers, and discount campaigns.

These new features have helped everyworks fit more conveniently into their customers’ lives, and attracted new customers from other market segments.

At the beginning, everyworks was a standalone product for Deutsche Bahn and for us. In the last four years, we’ve built a range of services for DB Station&Service AG, all under the “Digital Marketplace” (DiMa) umbrella. You can read about several of those projects elsewhere in the projects section of the website.

Moving everyworks into the same codebase as all the other DiMa services increasingly made sense, though it was clear it would be no small task. The move took quite some developer time, and has paid off, with reduced maintenance, increased reliability, and improved UI as the everyworks admin screens got upgraded with all the features that we’d developed in the time we’d been building those other products. Since the switch, adding new features has been more straightforward and well-integrated.