Simple In/Out Web Hooks Become More Powerful
January 13, 2020
We’ve long believed your in/out board is only useful if it’s everywhere with you throughout the day. It’s for this reason that Simple In/Out offers apps for phones, tablets, desktop computers, and televisions. We also have our website, which is viewable from any modern web browser anywhere with internet access.
Beyond our apps, you can take your Simple In/Out board to the next level by integrating further with other tools you use every day. To that end, we have offered an API (for the adventurous types with programming skills) and web hooks.
Today, Simple In/Out’s web hooks receive a major upgrade to make them more powerful and easier to manage than ever before.
When we set out to improve web hooks, we started by allowing web hooks for individual groups as well as whole organizations. For those using web hooks for integrations into chat services like Slack or Microsoft Teams, this is a big deal. You can now send Simple In/Out activity for a single group of users (say Marketing) to their Marketing Slack channel without polluting conversations with the activity of other users outside the group.
The second thing we wanted to realize was filtering a web hook’s events. By default, web hooks report on status updates and scheduled statuses, as well as when status updates change the past. While this is helpful in many instances, the above Slack/Teams example is not one of them. You may only wish to see current status updates and not be bothered that a manager corrected Gary’s status updates from last week. Web hooks can now be customized to only output event types that you choose.
The third item we improved was activation. If you need to temporarily disable a web hook, previously you needed to delete it outright. Web hooks often send to some pretty crazy-looking URLs, so adding them again is painful. Now, administrators can deactivate a web hook from delivering while still keeping it for the future.
Finally, we set out to make it easier to see what’s happening when a web hook isn’t performing as you’d expect. If we encounter an error when attempting to deliver your web hook, we output that information to help debug what’s happening. If we see too many errors in a row, we’ll deactivate the web hook automatically and email the administrators about it. This is critical to aid administrators in fixing services that may be broken on their end.
This is by far the largest upgrade to web hooks ever, and we hope that this work will lead to many more integrations in the future.
