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.

At the very core of Simple In/Out are automatic status updates. Whether using Geofences, Beacons, WiFi Networks (Android), or desktop computer activity, having your in/out board always up-to-date has never been easier.

Even before we had our first paying customer, we’ve had requests to add more monitoring of automatic updates for administrators. These requests generally come in three flavors:

• “I want to know whether an employee updates their status automatically or manually because I cannot trust them.”
• “I don’t want my employees to ever make manual status updates, only automatic updates with their phones because I cannot trust them.”
• “I want to see where my employees are on a map because I cannot trust them.”

We understand that not every industry can hire folks that can be trusted implicitly. We also understand that our solutions for updating from a physical place via a tablet running FrontDesk or TimeClock may not be for every organization. But, we always need to balance user privacy with new feature requests.

Most of the users installing Simple In/Out for automatic updates are doing so on their personal devices. We take privacy very seriously. We never transmit, store, or display location data. Period. That’s the commitment we’ve made since Day 1, and one that we will continue to honor each and every day. This precludes us from ever being able to show maps where users are located. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Not allowing users to make manual status updates at all presents a whole new set of challenges. For starters, removing manual updates also removes the ability for users to add comments that provide valuable context about status updates. Deeper still, if a user doesn’t have internet access then an automatic update can fail. Simple In/Out presents a notification to the user that the update wasn’t made, and the user must react by updating their status manually. Taking this away places more burden on administrators to correct the record.

That all being said, there is absolutely value in providing information to administrators so they can make determinations about whether users are performing dishonest status updates from their phone or computer.

To that end, we’ve added new information to many of Simple In/Out’s reports displaying whether statuses were updated automatically or manually. By displaying this information, we provide additional clarity to administrators and managers. This information can also aid administrators in properly configuring Geofences, Beacons, and WiFi Networks to maximize the effectiveness of automatic updates.

This information is now presented in the following reports: Activity, Print/PDF, and Export. We’ve also added this to our API, allowing access to third-party developers (with your permission, of course). This information is only available to those users either viewing their own report or to those users that have permission to run reports on other users.

We hope that by adding this information to reports, we’ve properly balanced the need to know how status updates were made with the privacy of all our Simple In/Out users.

We’re happy to announce the newest member of the Simply Made Apps team. Today, Kenny Lindley is joining Simply Made Apps as a web developer.

While we’re making this announcement today, Kenny has been interning at Simply Made Apps for the past several months. He’s already shipped substantial Simple In/Out features such as Status Resets and our Quote generator. As I write this post, he’s placing the finishing touches on another feature request we’ve had from our customers, all while coding part time.

Kenny has a Bachelor of Science in Game and Simulation Programming, a natural curiosity in all things technology, and is a quick study. Having Kenny in our Fargo office full time is going to enable us to deliver even more features that delight our Simple In/Out customers.

We’re thrilled to welcome Kenny to the Simply Made Apps family.

With Simple In/Out’s automatic updates, Quick Picks, and our easy to use interfaces, it’s never been easier to have an accurate in/out board available everywhere. Even with your best efforts, sometimes the in/out board can become stale. Perhaps your users have forgotten to perform updates. Maybe a user is utilizing automatic status updates, but their phone battery was dead. Occassionally the internet is unreachable. When users are never around overnight, you may wish to reset your board to start fresh every morning.

We’ve had a feature called Everybody Out for years that has done just that: reset your users OUT every evening. While this worked great, we’ve fielded requests over the years for more options. Today, we’re announcing we’ve completely rewritten Everybody Out, which we’ve renamed Status Resets. With Status Resets, you have all the features of Everybody Out and much more.

For starters, you can update everyone that remained IN to OUT every evening just as before. By default, that’s what a new Status Reset will do. For existing Everbody Out users, you’ll have a Status Reset that works the same as it did yesterday. No intervention is necessary.

We started by adding more advanced scheduling options. Everybody Out only allowed scheduling at the top of the hour every day. Status Resets allow scheduling at 5-minute increments, providing 100 times more possibilities for scheduling. Status Resets can also be executed on specific days of the week. It’s now possible to set up multiple Status Resets to craft a perfect resetting strategy for your organization.

Status Resets can also be established for subsets of your users with Groups. Resetting your board no longer has to apply to everybody.

Finally, you can reset everyone that is OUT to IN. While this is an advanced feature, there are use cases that this fulfills.

We hope that Status Resets provide extra power for our power users while maintaining the simple “reset my board every night” vision we initially had for Everybody Out.

Simple In/Out’s most popular feature, the feature that put us on the map back in 2011, is the ability to update your status automatically via Geofence. Carrying your phone equipped with the Simple In/Out app is all that’s necessary to keep your in/out board up to date. We perform these automatic updates while respecting both the user’s battery life and their privacy.

Earlier this year, we shipped new features and stability improvements to our Beacon and Network system. These changes have been well received, and we’ve been working to bring those same improvements to Geofencing. Today we’re launching our new and improved Geofences for all our customers on both iOS and Android.

What’s changed? To be honest, everything! Geofences are now more intelligent, more reliable, and offer more control for administrative-level users.

Reliability has been improved dramatically thanks to the new system that underpins Geofences. We’re now smarter about retrying attempts, confirming you are indeed in/out, and differentiating between Geofences, Beacons, Networks, and devices. This increased intelligence allows us to make better decisions, which leads to better success rates with Geofences.

Administrators can now control both the status and the entire comment applied when an automatic update occurs. These settings allow for some advanced use cases we couldn’t cover in the past. We’ve also launched a brand new Geofence editor on simpleinout.com that is easier to use and easier on the eyes.

After updating, most users will see an increase in Geofence consistency. For users on iOS that are monitoring more than 20 Geofences, they will notice a new screen asking them to pick no more than 20 Geofences to monitor at once. Apple limits phone developers like us to 20, and while we were attempting to get around that restriction in the past, it came with mixed results. It wasn’t very reliable at times, and to make matters worse it required us to ask for more permissions that we really would like. Now we are playing by Apple’s restrictive limit (Android users can monitor up to 100 Geofences at once).

A special THANK YOU to our customers for the great feedback and to our beta testers for kicking the Geofence tires over these past several weeks. With the help of many around the world, we couldn’t be more excited to place this update in everyone’s hands.

This Winter, we announced our Simple In/Out Public Beta program. Public Betas allow our customers to try new features and provide feedback before the general public. Users are able to guide the direction of our most popular features. We benefit from real-world usage of new features before they make their way to everyone. It’s win-win.

Our first public betas focused on our new Beacon and Network automatic update system, rebuilt from the ground up, to provide more features and stability. After we shipped, we went right to work implementing these improvements for Geofences. After months of private testing, we’re ready to expand the club to our public beta testers.

The new Geofencing system offers the same benefits as Beacons and Networks: more intelligence, more reliability, and more control for administrative-level users.

If you’re a Simple In/Out user using Geofences to automatically update your status, and you’d like to use our new system a few weeks before the general public, head over to our Public Beta page and click the link to sign up.

The Simple In/Out website (www.simpleinout.com) will no longer support Internet Explorer 9 and 10 starting January 1, 2020. We’re doing this for a couple of reasons.

Microsoft has stopped supporting Internet Explorer 9 and 10, so they’re no longer receiving important security updates. By supporting these old browsers, we’re actually slowing the adoption of modern, more secure web browsers.

By removing support for these old versions of Internet Explorer, we will be able to speed up development of the Simple In/Out website and offer features available to modern web browsers. If an old browser doesn’t have a shiny new feature that’s offered in modern web browsers, we’re unable to implement a feature because it won’t work for all users.

Users who attempt to load the Simple In/Out website using an unsupported browser will be redirected to this page with links to download the latest versions of Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

Simply Made Apps is opening paid web development internships for Summer 2019. As a web development intern, you’ll be solving practical problems every day for thousands of customers around the globe, all while working in a fast-paced team environment.

We’re looking for candidates with web development experience. A preference for JavaScript knowledge is a must; experience with Ruby is a plus. Git skills (or experience with source control management) is a must. Most importantly, we are looking for candidates with a curiosity for solving problems every day.

If you’re looking for real-world experience working on a team of developers and applying your skills to making customers happy, then this is the internship for you.

We’re offering flexible work schedules at our offices in downtown Fargo (required to be on-site).

If you’re interested in applying, send us a resume with cover page.

Simple In/Out will be offline for database maintenance on Sunday, May 26th, for approximately 45 minutes. We anticipate beginning at 2:05am 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.

This maintenance is necessary to perform a major database upgrade.

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 in the US.

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