Schedule Future Statuses in Simple In/Out

We’ve had a lot of requests over the years for Simple In/Out features.  We love receiving emails with ideas from our customers, and they heavily drive our roadmap.  Few requests have gathered as many responses as being able to schedule status updates for the future.

Scheduling a status update is an idea that we never anticipated when we started Simple In/Out back in 2011.  Simple In/Out has always been about what’s happening right now and what happening in the past.  There are a great many of our customers that don’t have a need to see what’s coming in the future, but there are a few customers that have compelling use cases for this functionality.

Future statuses is a feature we’ve been giving thought to for years, and today we’re proud to announce we’re taking the first steps.  Known internally as “Project Firestone”, Simple In/Out now features the ability to tell us when you intend to be In or Out in the future.  When the time comes, Simple In/Out automatically applies your status update, sends any Push Notifications (if your plan supports them), and fires Web Hooks (if you have those or are using our Slack integration).  All the while, those future statuses are viewable by other users like past statuses.  We’ve even built a calendar report to make it easy to see what’s upcoming.

For now, you’ll need to use our website (simpleinout.com) to schedule future statuses.  In the near future, we’ll be adding scheduling to our phone apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.  Look for these updates in the next couple of weeks.

We know that this is a lot of power and while there are organizations that will put this to work immediately, there are also many that will not have a reason to ever use scheduled statuses. We’ve taken great pains to choose good default settings, allowing everyone to see scheduled statuses and only users that can modify the statuses of others to schedule statuses.  These are just the defaults, and organizations can disabled this entirely, allow everyone to schedule statuses, or restrict scheduling to various levels in between.  The choice is completely up to you.  We also identify all scheduled statuses as coming from “Scheduler”, so it’s 100% transparent where any user’s statuses are coming from.

This is the foundation on which we can continue to build some amazing things for Simple In/Out customers.  If you have additional ideas about future statuses (or anything at all), never hesitate to fire us an email.  We come to our office every day with the singular goal of making Simple In/Out the best electronic in/out board around.