Hot on the heels of the most significant permission upgrade we’ve undertaken in years, we’re announcing another exciting upgrade to Simple In/Out. This upgrade centers around Scheduled Statuses and unlocks many new capabilities and workflows.

Scheduled Statuses have historically been singular points in time: the time Simple In/Out applies the Scheduled Status as your current status on the board. While this feature is maintained as-is, we have added an optional end time. End times alter a Scheduled Status from a singular point in time to a time span.

Scheduled Statuses with end times immediately benefit how they appear on the board and the Scheduled Statuses report. Meetings now have more context for their duration. Vacations now span multiple days, removing the need to add many Scheduled Statuses to relay that information to co-workers on the Scheduled Statuses report.

When a Scheduled Status containing a time span begins, Simple In/Out will update your current status as always. Simple In/Out will intelligently examine your current status when the ending time comes. If it’s the same as the Scheduled Status, Simple In/Out will update your current status to what it was before the Scheduled Status began. This behavior enables an excellent meeting experience, a widespread use case for Scheduled Statuses. If you are IN with an upcoming Scheduled Status for an hour-long meeting, your current status could be updated to BUSY at the beginning of the meeting and back to IN at the end of the meeting. All automatically!

The above use case is made even better with our native calendar integration, which now honors event duration and end times.

We’ve also made two additional improvements to the Scheduled Statuses report. First, it refreshes automatically, allowing users to leave it open throughout the day and see updated schedules as they change. Second, we leave already-applied Scheduled Statuses on the Scheduled Statuses report for a day, so it’s easier to see what happened earlier in the day without resorting to a different report.

Scheduled Statuses with end times was a wildly popular request over the years, and we’re thrilled to bring these improvements to Simple In/Out.

Simple In/Out has a robust permissions system based on roles. Every user has a role, and your role dictates what you can and cannot do. While we’ve had many levers to customize user permissions, these settings were largely all-or-nothing. You could see all the users on the Simple In/Out board or none of them. You could run reports on all of the users or only yourself. You could update any other user’s current status or not.

Today, we announce the most extensive role upgrade ever: group-based permissions. Simple In/Out allows users different permissions depending on their group assignments. At first glance, this change may seem minor, but it opens up numerous basic and advanced use cases.

Users can be limited to viewing only those on the board who belong to the same groups. In today’s era of Single Sign On, this is crucial for maintaining compartmentalization. Administrators can restrict permissions, such as updating the statuses of other users (past, present, and scheduled) so that managers can only perform those actions on users they oversee. Reporting is another frequent request; now, managers may only run reports on users within their groups.

You may be asking about Linked Companies, a feature we offered to separate users. Linked Companies has been deprecated and will be removed from Simple In/Out. Linked Company customers can now achieve separation with roles without the added complexity and expense of entirely separated organizations. With group-based permissions, these customers will save time and money.

To take advantage of our new permissions, ensure you have a recent version of your Simple In/Out apps. We hope these new permissions unlock new worlds of possibilities.

Simple In/Out has long partnered with Microsoft, specifically with Microsoft Teams. Our integration places your Simple In/Out board right inside Microsoft Teams. Users with the popular chat client open all day are a click away from seeing who’s in/out and updating their status.

While Microsoft Teams is quite popular, not everyone using a PC has Teams open all day. For some users, their email client is their hub of activity. For others, it’s their calendar.

Today, we proudly announce our integrated Simple In/Out board is coming to two additional Microsoft platforms: Outlook and Microsoft 365 (formerly Office). For users that live and die in their email/calendar, Simple In/Out will live right along with you. Like our popular Teams integration, Simple In/Out will present a new tab that contains your Simple In/Out board and status update features. Our integration is complete with groups, find-as-you-type search, and Quick Picks.

We’re thrilled to add two new platforms to our expanding Simple In/Out universe of solutions. We know our email/calendar-heavy users will love this new capability.

Since 2016, Simple In/Out has sported automatic status updates via Networks. When your phone connects/disconnects from the company WiFi network, Simple In/Out can update your status accordingly. Like our other automatic updating methods, Networks can keep your board current with zero user intervention.

Networks have many advantages over Geofences and Beacons. WiFi networks are smaller than Geofences, larger than Bluetooth areas provided by beacons, and use hardware you’ve likely already installed in your offices. The enormous caveat with Networks has been that we’ve only supported Android devices. Apple has never provided the tools necessary to build this feature for iPhones.

That is, until today. Today, we announce Networks for iPhone with Simple In/Out version 11.0 in the App Store. Networks use the latest technology to deliver automatic status updates based on your phone’s connection to your known WiFi hotspots. If you have Networks already for Android users, iPhone users can activate them within the new Simple In/Out app. If you’re a Simple In/Out administrator who has never created a Network, you can manage them on simpleinout.com. Here’s a video showing the process.

We’re thrilled to achieve feature parity with Networks across all our phone apps. We anticipate Networks will be immensely popular. Thanks to Stephen and Josh for all their hard work and testing to bring this monumental feature to our iPhone customers worldwide.

If you have Simple In/Out Desktop version 1.6.0 or earlier installed on your Windows computer, you’ll need to download a new version from our website to upgrade further. Download the latest version from our website.

Why?

Microsoft Windows requires apps like Simple In/Out Desktop to be “signed” to verify authenticity. Protecting users against imposter software is something we happily comply with for the good of our users and the peace of mind of IT professionals everywhere.

Signing an app requires we update the “signing certificate” every few years. We recently shipped version 1.6.1 which is the first signed with this new certificate. Everything works great, but we discovered afterward that older versions of Simple In/Out Desktop will no longer update themselves to this latest version due to differences in the signing.

To upgrade past 1.6.0, download the latest version from our website. Once 1.6.1 or later has been installed, Simple In/Out Desktop will accept future updates as it has in the past.

We apologize for this one-time painful update experience due to this change. We hope this is an aberration and future signing updates will be compatible with our updating system. If you have any questions about updating, we’re here to help.

Since our beginning in 2011, Simple In/Out has had two core statuses: IN and OUT. Beyond this, every status update has an optional comment that provides valuable additional context to your board. Statuses and comments have served Simple In/Out well over the years. If a user was working from home, updating their status to IN with a “Working from home” comment relayed their state well.

Over the years, we received many requests for more core statuses beyond IN and OUT. We resisted for the sake of simplicity. After all, what could be easier than only two options? When the global pandemic struck, more and more customers were working from home. Soon after, we began to change our thinking.

We’re proud to announce the addition of 5 core statuses to Simple In/Out: REMOTE, BUSY, BREAK, SICK, and VACATION.

Delivering these new statuses required us to ship updates to every application and integration we offer because this fundamental change permeates every Simple In/Out feature. Only a few examples:

• All our reports needed further options to correctly calculate total time, as some customers include break time and some do not.
• Our Desktop Presence feature in Simple In/Out Desktop can trigger a dedicated REMOTE status when working from home.
• Microsoft Teams Presence integration) can now properly indicate a user is BUSY in Simple In/Out to match Teams.

The list goes on and on.

We also considered our existing customers, some of which have been using Simple In/Out for over a decade and may not be interested in changing their workflows. We’ve made these new core statuses optional so every customer can choose to enable them (or try them and disable them later). Administrators can manage their available statuses via Company Settings.

We are confident our worldwide customers will welcome these improvements to all Simple In/Out’s capabilities. New statuses were among the most popular and oldest feature requests we have ever received. Thank you amazing customers for their continued passion about Simple In/Out!

We’re happy to announce that Steve Gibbs has joined Simply Made Apps as a web developer.

Steve graduated with an Associates of Applied Science in Computer Programming from my alma mater here in Fargo/Moorhead. He comes to us with a decade and a half of experience in the field of web development.

As a member of our web team, Steve will be working with everyone here to execute new projects we’re kicking off soon across the entire Simple In/Out product line.

We’re thrilled to welcome Steve to the Simply Made Apps team.

Simple In/Out has many reports to analyze your status updates. We have reports that count time, offer chronological lists of status updates, charts, and more. We also have reports that export into formats like PDF and CSV to take with you.

If you are required to submit or monitor reports regularly, repeatedly running the same reports can be a hassle. Users must remember to do it every period, remember their settings, and wait for the report to generate. How can we make this easier?

We are thrilled to announce the release of our latest feature: Scheduled Email Reports. Users can receive reports directly in their inbox, complete with their preferred settings and format. You design the perfect report and choose your schedule. We offer daily, weekly, biweekly, and monthly options. Once set, Simple In/Out will generate the report with your preferred timespan and email you a link to download. Your report will be ready for you first thing in the morning.

This feature supports both the Print/PDF and Export reports. All presentation options are supported.

We believe emailing reports will help our users save time and increase productivity. If you have any questions or feedback, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!

A couple years back, we shipped a new status update interface for Simple In/Out Android.

Previously, we shipped a new status update interface for Simple In/Out Android. This new interface cleared up the meaning of our tabs, provided more places to update your status, improved Quick Picks, and brought simplicity to our navigation. We’ve followed suit on Simple In/Out Desktop and our website.

Today, we announce these same improvements on Simple In/Out for iPhone. You can read more about our thought process and how the new interface works here.

We’re also announcing a new Simple In/Out interface for our iPad users. Historically, Simple In/Out’s phone app ran the same on iPads as phones. Doing so led to lots of wasted space. Now, the new Status “Flyup” will rest on the left-hand side. You can view the board and access the entire status-updating interface simultaneously.

We’re thrilled to bring these changes to iPhone and iPad users worldwide.

Simple In/Out will be offline for database maintenance on Sunday, December 31st, for approximately 1 hour. We anticipate beginning at 2:00 am Central (US) time. During this period, the website will be inaccessible. All apps and integrations in the Simple In/Out ecosystem will report connection errors.

Most of our Microsoft Teams presence integrations will disconnect during this maintenance. Microsoft requires us to renew all Microsoft Teams presence integrations every 45 minutes (which is crazy). If your Microsoft Teams presence integration disconnects, you’ll receive an email from Simple In/Out to reconnect after maintenance concludes. We have been begging Microsoft to loosen this absurd requirement to no avail. We have no options until Microsoft sets their presence subscription times to match their other Graph services.

We don’t take the idea of downtime lightly. We are conducting this operation in the middle of the night during a three-day holiday weekend to minimize disruptions.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to let us know.