Simple In/Out has supported automatically updating statuses via Beacons since Apple introduced “iBeacons” all the way back in 2013. Last year, we improved our Beacon system dramatically with more control over in/out statuses, comments, and performance. We’re believers that automatic updates via Beacons have many amazing use cases.

To date, we’ve also sold Beacon hardware directly from simpleinout.com. But, this approach had three downsides.

First, customers weren’t aware of how to change Beacon configurations if they wanted to make adjustments. We’d do the initial programming, but we’d have to walk customers through programming changes after they’ve taken delivery. In rare cases, the customer would ship the Beacons back to us so we could reprogram them.

Second, international shipping took a long time with decreased visibility. We always offered free shipping, and that worked fine for our US customers. Internationally, our free shipping option led to lost orders, orders that would take 30 or more days to arrive, etc.

Third, improved shipping was cost-prohibitive. For customers in Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, improved shipping was often $200 USD or more. That’s a bitter pill to swallow when our average Beacon order was $70 USD. In fact, we’ve been counseling some of our international customers on sourcing Beacon hardware resellers closer to home for a while.

That brings us to today and the news that we’re ceasing Beacon hardware reselling and shifting to third-party resellers. As I mentioned at the top, we still believe in Beacons and will continue to innovate in the automatic update space with Beacons. We are shifting to helping customers find local vendors to purchase the hardware that will work with Simple In/Out.

Our effort begins with our Beacon Hardware Purchasing Guide. This document discusses the requirements for Beacon hardware and lists places to purchase them directly. We’ll be expanding the list of countries and vendors as our customers source them in the future.

The easiest place to purchase is right from Amazon.com.

Second, we’ve ramped up our documentation around programming Beacon hardware. It’s not a difficult process, so we want our Beacon customers to know the process inside and out. We even have a new help video for the visual learners out there.

We love Beacons and our Beacon customers do too. We look forward to supporting and improving Beacon-based automatic updates for years to come.

We’ve made a lot of updates recently to our integration between Simple In/Out and Microsoft Teams. All the while, we haven’t forgotten about our other favorite messaging and group chat app Slack. We’ve had our Slack app available for years that allows customers to designate a Slack channel. Inside that channel, we’ll send Simple In/Out status updates to keep everyone up to date.

Today, we’re announcing the next version of our Slack app with support for our new Slash Command. Using our Slash Command, you can update your Simple In/Out status right from inside Slack, without ever needing to reach for a Simple In/Out app or website.

Here’s how it works. In Slack, you can simply type:

/inout in

…and we’ll check you in with Simple In/Out.

/inout out

…checks you out with Simple In/Out. It’s that easy! We even support optional comments for the valuable additional context, like:

/inout in at the office

We’re thrilled to have this communication between Simple In/Out and Slack for all our Slack users. If you have ideas for more commands you’d like us to implement, don’t hesitate to fire us an email.

Simple In/Out will be offline for database maintenance on Sunday, September 6th, for approximately 3 hours. We anticipate beginning at 12:00am Central (US) time. During this period, the website will be inaccessible. All of the apps in the Simple In/Out ecosystem will also report errors as they will be unable to connect to Simple In/Out.

Our database provider has informed us of an unplanned database update this weekend. As such, we’re using this forced downtime to perform another major database changeover to reduce any downtime in the future.

We don’t take the idea of downtime lightly, which is why we’re conducting this operation in the middle of the night during a three day holiday weekend here in the US.

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

Last month, we launched the 2.0 version of our Simple In/Out integration with Microsoft Teams. This big update added your user board right inside a tab within Microsoft Teams, no longer requiring our Teams customers to revert to a web browser to see their users. At the time, I wrote that “if demand continues, we’ll consider more features for Microsoft Teams”.

And boy did demand continue! Almost immediately, users wanted to update their Simple In/Out status from inside Teams as well. After all, if you can view the board and make status updates, then you don’t need a web browser to keep your colleagues up to date.

Today, we’re launching our Status tab within Microsoft Teams! Now, users can make status updates easily without leaving Teams. We’ve added a text box for those valuable status update comments, as well as all your Quick Picks for one-click convenience.

If you haven’t yet, You can install our Microsoft Teams Add-on today.

We’ve always been proponents of placing your in/out board everywhere. This is why we offer apps for phones, tablets, desktop computers, and even televisions. Your Simple In/Out board is only useful if it comes with you.

We’ve supported seeing your Simple In/Out status updates within Teams for years. This is a great way to see updates without having to pull up Simple In/Out on your computer or phone. We’ve had requests to add more features to our Teams integration, but it hadn’t been a burning priority. With the COVID-19 pandemic gripping the world, priorities in the workplace have shifted and with that shift comes more features for Microsoft Teams.

Today, we’re announcing version 2.0 of our Microsoft Teams add-on which now supports viewing your Simple In/Out board right inside of Microsoft Teams. With a few clicks, you can have a Simple In/Out tab with access to your list of users and their current statuses. This board updates automatically (just like our web board), so you’re never more than a click away. You can search, sort, and view groups right from inside Teams.

You can install our Microsoft Teams Add-on Today.

If demand continues, we’ll consider more features for Microsoft Teams. If you’re a Microsoft Teams user, shoot us an email and let us know what would be valuable for you.

TLDR: It’s Bright!

This week we announced French support for Simple In/Out. In doing so, we added French to every app with the notable exception of Simple In/Out Desktop. While some may infer that we are abandoning desktop apps, the exact opposite is true. We’re doubling-down on desktop.

Rewind to 2013, a time when Simple In/Out is just 2 years old. Microsoft has just shipped Windows 8 with its polarizing user interface. We were called to a meeting at Microsoft’s offices to discuss building a desktop version of our Simple In/Out client. The timing for us wasn’t great, but we could see the potential. We set out to ship a first-class Windows 8 app with the help of Microsoft and a third-party design firm.

When we launched Simple In/Out for Windows, it was everything Microsoft wanted a Windows app to be. We built atop their latest APIs, their carousel interface, their look and feel, and their ideas for how to manage windows/preferences/etc.

The trouble began the moment Microsoft starting walking away from their Windows 8 decisions. Suddenly, the platform we built upon was deprecated, support waned, and things started breaking with no fixes in sight. The most famous example is a simple field picker that we had to build ourselves, from scratch, to avoid crashes on Windows Mobile. It was clear we were living on borrowed time and that a full rewrite was unavoidable.

While the legacy of Windows 8 was bearing down on us, we launched Simple In/Out Desktop for Mac. As Mac users ourselves, we were excited to ship an app that lived in our docks. While we had the best intentions, we started to fall behind the state of the art. We had too much code servicing workarounds within our desktop apps.

Throughout this time, the rise of App Stores on desktop computers added new wrinkles. In workplaces using device management, authenticating store accounts individually per computer for App Stores is a real pain. Worse yet, Apple’s draconian policies prevent free trials unless we both fork over 30% of our revenue and use their third-rate subscription management system.

With the need to rewrite the Windows app, dramatically update the Mac app, and leave the desktop App Stores, our direction was clear. We needed to start over. We set to work last year on a new desktop app.

Our aim is a modern desktop app for both Windows and Mac, built on a platform we can efficiently maintain in the future. We’ll support the latest OS features like Dark Mode. The new Simple In/Out Desktop will feature the best in/out board we’ve built to date, with an interface that’s more consistent and powerful. And, of course, we’ll support French immediately.

We will ship a Public Beta of Simple In/Out Desktop, for both Windows and Mac, via a free download from our website. We’ll gather feedback and suggestions as we add more features throughout the beta process. Our existing desktop apps will remain available until the new Simple In/Out Desktop reaches 1.0.

If you wish to give the new Simple In/Out Desktop a try, watch our Public Beta page. You can also subscribe to our mailing list. We can’t wait to share with everyone what we’ve been working on these past few months.

Bonjour!

We’re thrilled to announce Simple In/Out supports localization in French. You can use simpleinout.com as well as our apps for phones, FrontDesk, TimeClock, and Simple In/Out TV.

Our desktop apps for Windows and Mac do not support French as of now. We have something new in mind for those apps.

French was the most popular language request we’ve ever had in our history. This is almost certainly a direct result of our popularity in Canada and Europe.

Au revoir.

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.

2019 was a milestone year for Simply Made Apps. 2020 will be the tenth year we’ve been building Simple In/Out. We’re thrilled to have a product that’s loved by thousands of organizations around the globe.

2019 was a year of fundamental changes. We examined our core offerings and asked ourselves a simple question: how can we improve what put Simple In/Out on the map in 2011? With those answers and customer requests guiding our roadmap, we went to work. The results were solid software and new features for our users everywhere.

Here are just a few of the big things we delivered in 2019.

New Geofence, Beacon, and Network features

We went back to the drawing board and completely rewrote our most popular feature: automatic updates from phones. Not only did we make automatic updates more reliable, but we added much-requested new features like easier management, more control over comments, and enhanced intelligence about when updates should be performed.

Simple In/Out Public Beta Program

Ok, this one is feature-related. We launched our Public Betas for Android and iOS users that wished to help test and shape new features. The results were amazing. We’ll be doing more Public Betas this year. Stay tuned!

Everybody Out became Status Resets

We had a feature called Everybody Out and it did exactly what it sounds like: checked all your users out. We replaced this with Status Resets which can reset select users, set statuses to in or out, and offer much more flexibility.

Automatic vs Manual Status Updates

We now display whether a status update was made automatically (think Geofence) or manually. This information is visible in several reports, allowing administrators to have a more informed view of how the in/out is updated throughout the day.

Contact Export Report

We created a new report to export user information, expanding the ways companies can integrate Simple In/Out.

It is also worth noting a few non-feature things that happened in 2019.

Scheduled Webinars

Before last year, we conducted webinars every Wednesday morning to demonstrate new features and answer questions. Wednesdays didn’t work for everyone, so we now conduct webinars by appointment.

We Hired Another Web Developer

While we like our small team (and plan to keep it that way), we were thrilled to add another web developer. We quickly put Kenny to work shipping new features.

Simple In/Out and our amazing company wouldn’t be possible without our incredible customers. You’re all the best around, and we can’t wait to wow you with the new projects we have coming in 2020.

Simple In/Out is a hub for storing your users and their current statuses. Simple In/Out also works well as a portable company directory. Whether you click on a user on your computer or tap on a user via your tablet or phone, we provide contact information like email addresses and phone numbers along with one-click options to start a new email or dial your phone.

Occasionally analog methods are still necessary. Perhaps you need a phone sheet to hand to someone making calls. Maybe an email list is needed for someone that doesn’t have access to your Simple In/Out board. If you’re really generous, you may be putting together a Christmas list and would like all your co-workers in a spreadsheet.

For times like these, you can always print the Simple In/Out board. Today, we’re taking it a step further with our new Contacts report. The Contacts report exports your users and their contact information into a CSV file for use in your favorite spreadsheet application (like Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, AirTable, etc). You can then manipulate the data however you wish. Add/delete columns, move things around, distribute electronically, or send the file to your printer.

We’ve built this report similar to our Print/PDF and Export reports. We provide a way to filter your users so you cam export only a group or certain users. We are also respectful of your role. You must have permission to run reports on others to export the contact information of other users. If you’re an administrator and your organization utilizes TimeClock, you’ll also have QR Codes for your badges in the export file.

We hope this makes life easier for those customers that need a quick contact sheet.