Simple In/Out Gains Roles for Fine Grain User Permissions

It’s been a while since our last blog post about new Simple In/Out features, but rest assured we’ve been busy. Since last December we’ve been hard at work on a particular new feature that we’ve just shipped. We’re proud to announce a major change to the way Simple In/Out understands user permissions: Roles.

Roles in Simple In/Out offer more fine-grained control over which users can view/edit various things, all the while making it easier than ever to understand why a user can or cannot perform an action. Before today, users has three switches: admin, managing the status of other users, managing your own status. The company also had various options to determine which of the user types could do which things.

Now with roles, we’ve moved almost all of those choices to user roles. Each user in your company belongs to one role. This gives administrators one place to determine which users can do which things. Have a need to allow a user to manage your billing? Create a Billing role and assign your accounting users to it. Need to allow managers to run reports on others but not allow them to add and delete users? Create a department head role with reporting options and assign your managers to it. The possibilities are many.

With this change, we’re also announcing a new permission in roles that has been a big request from our customers: the ability to hide the board entirely from some users. The use case is having users that should have accounts and should update their status, but for security reasons they shouldn’t be able to view other users and their statuses. Perhaps you have a contractor and you want to hide the list of actual employees. Perhaps your users are students within an after-school program and viewing other student statuses isn’t desired. Simple In/Out will now allow you to have users in a role that cannot see other users, but can still do things like update their status, run reports on themselves on the website, etc.

Roles and hiding the board from users have been several months in the making but they lay the groundwork for big new features we plan to build in the future. We’re also very excited for everyone to see what we’re working on next.