Company Enhancements

Companies are a cornerstone of MeetMate, offering significant creative opportunities to shape their functionality. Many features have been carefully considered, with some systems partially implemented and awaiting a last few final touches.

Company Members

While there is a general idea backend already has an implementation in place, the frontend addition was a bit more time consuming. Therefore a design and its functional implementation are not yet completed. Some issues also arise form parity between the original idea and its backend counter part.

Company Member Onboarding

To clarify the onboarding process for company members, a specialized flow was designed. The process begins with an invite link, typically sent by the company administrator. When clicked, the link directs the new member to a dedicated page where they can create their password and access the company’s MeetMate account. Once registered, the new member can quickly join the platform and collaborate with their team.

Members in the Backend

Meanwhile the backend implementation considers the company owner as an administrator, in of fully setting up and managing the employees. This system, while fully functional, currently sees no use and may require adjustments to better align with the evolving project. The backend enforces authorisation checks to allowing company members to perform editing tasks similar to the owner while restricting access to critical company settings.

The company member section includes getting information on specific or all members, adding / creating new members and deleting existing members. These methods inherit parts of the normal client implementation while always confining the access to a companies members or owners. These checks mirror client-side restrictions but are tailored to handle company-specific cases. Notably, members should not be able to delete their own accounts messing up the internal structure of companies, therefore the clients endpoints for deletion are using similar checks to stop this issue. Common validations have been abstracted into reusable methods to maintain consistency and reduce redundancy.

  private boolean isNotCompanyOwner(String email) {
    return userRepository.findUserByEmail(email)
        .orElseThrow(() -> new EntityNotFoundException("User not found!"))
        .getRole() != UserRole.COMPANY_OWNER;
  }

  private boolean isNotCompanyMember(Company company, long memberId) {
    return !company.getMemberIds().contains(memberId);
  }

Challenges and Next Steps

The existing backend system is functional but needs better synchronization with the frontend and refinements to match real-world use cases. Completing the frontend integration and resolving discrepancies between initial designs and backend implementations will help finalize this feature, making it fully usable and user-friendly.

Company Default Settings

To reduce the repetitive tasks companies face on a daily basis, we explored ways to leverage the computational power of our system to automate these processes. This would involve the automatic creation of standard appointments with pre-set times, titles, and locations based on configurable default settings. By setting up these routine actions, we can free up valuable time for employees to focus on more complex and meaningful tasks, while ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of human error.

Company Browser

Another feature we envisioned for the future was an improved browsing page for companies, allowing clients to easily discover businesses that meet their needs and are located nearby. Clients could apply filters such as business type and location to refine their search. Currently, when looking up companies, all of them are displayed, which leads to significant load on the system. To support this, we would need to implement a new system using GraphQL called multi-query pagination. This would break down the queries into smaller, more manageable subsets, reducing the load on the backend API and improving overall performance. However, this feature has not been added yet due to the complexities involved in integrating multi-query pagination, both in the backend queries and designing a functional browsing page for the frontend.

Conclusion

While we had many exciting plans for implementing additional features, prioritizing a functional and stable application is crucial. In a professional context, it’s important to focus on strengthening core functionalities before introducing smaller, less essential features. By ensuring that the foundation is solid, we can create a more reliable user experience and avoid unnecessary complications down the line. As a platform continues to grow, continually revisiting these ideas helps implement them at the right time, ensuring a balance of innovation with stability.