Coming to an Itinerary Near You: Kaptio’s First 2024 Release, Duomo.

First came Alhambra. Followed by Borobudur and Colosseum. And in the tradition of naming Kaptio’s releases after UNESCO World Heritage Sites and related travel destinations, we proudly present to you the Duomo release. First released in November 2, 2023, followed by several minor and patch release throughout December and January, we are excited to introduce to you the new features and enhancements associated with this release. Additionally, we will discuss our new release cycle and work methodology, and when you can expect new updates to the Kaptio suite of products.

Have you upgraded yet? We’re excited to spotlight some of the amazing innovations and developments produced here at Kaptio and of course thank our amazing teammates and partners for their help in the journey. 🚀

📣 What’s New in the Release?

We have lots to tell you about 🙌, so let’s get started. Here are some hand-picked highlights we’d like to share from the Duomo release; more information can always be found in our release documentation.

✅ WETU Content Connector

This new feature, in the pilot stages, allows product operations teams and product managers an ability to integrate into 3rd party content providers, such as WETU, enabling the import of content into Kaptio Content records. By integrating with 3rd party content providers, our customers can create attractive documents more easily and cost effectively.

Customers with a WETU account will be able to add their API key and search their WETU content library when creating a content article. When a WETU article is selected, it is copied over to Kaptio in a read-only format, with all related media, at which time it’s available to be used in Kaptio’s document engine. This reduces frictions in product operations, when creating custom, branded content to be sent to customers.

✅ Service Search Improvements

This enhancement to the Service Search feature is a redesign that allows users to find the most appropriate travel service based on availability and cancellation policy. It now also offers users, like sales agents, the ability to bypass service search when booking services with limited live availability. This simplifies the process for sales agents and itinerary specialists to create personalised travel experiences with the best-fit options, improving end-user productivity and decreasing hassle.

In this release, we have made updates to the look and feel of the feature as well as included changes based on user feedback, with the aim to streamline service discovery and bolster service information availability.

✅ Service Extensions for Itinerary Builder

Another new feature being piloted in the Duomo release is service extensions for Itinerary Builder. This feature allows customers to extend the functionality of Itinerary Builder when needed by use of a custom flow. This new addition allows the response from a custom flow to be processed when hitting save, thus enabling end-users like sales agents to extend the Kaptio Travel product so they can tailor it to their specific use cases. Ideally, this is for customer developers to seamlessly hook into Itinerary Builder and allow easy back-end set-up for custom use cases.

✅ Rail Seat Map Extension

A brand new pilot feature that allows our customers to define a Salesforce flow that can be invoked within Itinerary Builder when confirming a rail booking that requires seats to be selected. Customers have full control over the Salesforce Flow and can build their own feature using lightning components in the standard Salesforce development environment.

We also laid the groundwork for a lot of future improvements and enhancements in this release, creating a foundation for a more responsive, efficient experience within the Kaptio suite of products. We also released new products during this time, like the much-anticipated Kaptio Pay, which we will highlight in another blog post altogether (special things require special posts).

Kaptio’s Way of Working 😎

i.e. when you can expect new releases

In the fall of 2023, leading into the beginning of the Duomo development, Kaptio adopted Cycles as the schedule and cadence of our releases. Cycles are inspired by ShapeUp, a framework for lean product management developed by Basecamp, a software company that makes a web-based team organisation tool.

A cycle is comprised of 6-weeks during which our engineering teams are developing and delivering product, and the product team is shaping upcoming work in close collaboration with stakeholders. After each six-week session is a 2–3-week cooldown sprint during which teams fix bugs and address technical debt, shape-up upcoming work, and/or even learn new things. Meanwhile, the business selects (bets) on pitching for the next cycle. The cooldown sprints are planned like any other sprints, the main difference is that no new product feature work is scheduled for the cooldown sprint.

This means that you will see new releases every two months, and full releases (like Duomo) with a major + minor component every four months. We here at Kaptio Marketing will be coming to you with exciting release updates every four months, and new product announcements as they happen. Stay tuned!

In the meantime, if you would like a demo of the new Duomo release or a sneak peek at the latest Eiffel release, contact our sales team at hello@kaptio.com. We would like to thank our customer success team for providing the links to all the release information and product team for pulling it all together for us. Super stars for sure! ⭐