Improvements to Simple In/Out's Integration with Microsoft Teams Presence

Simple In/Out’s integration with Microsoft Teams has become incredibly popular. Among these Teams’ features is the ability to update your Simple In/Out status when your Microsoft Teams presence changes. You can see a video on our Teams presence integration here.

Teams presence integration is game changing for users that spend all day inside Teams, but there have always been a couple of caveats. Because Microsoft doesn’t provide context about why your Teams presence changed, we must apply every presence update to Simple In/Out. While that’s typically desirable, it doesn’t work well if you also update your Simple In/Out status in other ways. An example is lunch, where you may perform a Simple In/Out status update with a great comment like “At lunch, back at 1pm”. But since you’re gone from your computer, Microsoft Teams comes along and steps on this nice comment with their presence information (like “Away”). All context is gone for all those looking at your Simple In/Out board.

Today we’ve changed the rules for how Teams presence changes are honored. Our goal is to allow Simple In/Out comments left by the user to be maintained longer. We want to encourage users to leave informative status comments and not lose them to Teams presence changes. If Microsoft tells us your presence is now “out”, we won’t update your status in Simple In/Out if you’ve already updated it to “out”. The same is true with “in” statuses.

With this feature change, users only updating their Simple In/Out status through Microsoft Teams presence will see no changes. For users that update their Simple In/Out status themselves, today’s feature change should preserve comments and allow users to utilize the Teams presence feature where they may have disabled it in the past.