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.

Among our most popular Simple In/Out features are the ability to update your status automatically. 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 support three methods for automatic phone updates, each with pros/cons depending on your use case. We do all these automatic updates while respecting both the user’s battery life as well as their privacy.

Last year, we sat down and discussed ways we could make automatic updates even better. We set out with two goals in mind: add requested features from our customers and improve reliability. We launched our first Public Beta earlier this year to test this new system. For the past three months, we’ve been gathering feedback and making adjustments.

Today we’re launching this improved system for two of the three methods we support: Beacons and Networks. Every part of Beacons and Networks is smarter than ever before.

Specific to Beacons, when your phone lost sight of the Beacon for as little as 20 seconds, we previously needed to check you out right away. Sometimes this would lead to users checking out/in a bunch throughout the day. Our new system overcomes this limitation, confirming for longer that you indeed left. This solution cuts down on rapid-fire out/ins (internally dubbed “bee-bopping”).

Overwrite Protection also receives a big boost in intelligence. We can now determine differences among devices for our users with multiple Simple In/Out apps. We’ve also improved our handling of multiple Beacons or Networks. Our goal here is to eliminate those times we need to alert you that we’ve ignored an automatic update to only those times when it’s necessary to avoid removing an important comment you left on the board.

We’re allowing more customization of Beacons and Networks than ever before. Administrators can now control both the status and the entire comment applied when an automatic update occurs. These settings allow for some advanced uses. By allowing a Beacon/Network to update your status to “in” when you exit a coverage area and customize the whole comment, it’s possible to create areas within larger areas (like Geofences) that can provide more targeted status information without checking the user out.

We’ve also added both Beacons and Network management to simpleinout.com. No longer are administrators relegated to finding an Android device to manage their Networks.

This new system is the result of months of planning and execution, as well as great feedback from both our customers and our beta testers. Thanks to everyone that helped us with this launch. As you have likely guessed, we’re hard at work bringing all these improvements to Simple In/Out’s Geofence system. Expect a new Public Beta soon.

PS: Unfortunately, we still are not able to enable Networks for our iPhone customers. Years after we shipped Networks for Android and even Windows Phone, we still do not have access to the necessary APIs from Apple to get this done.

Nearly three years ago, we started conducting Wednesday Webinars for Simple In/Out. These webinars are an excellent opportunity to speak directly with both our customers and our potential customers. We talk about newly-shipped features, new feature requests, and highlight ways to make Simple In/Out work for a multitude of environments.

But, we acknowledge that Wednesday at 10 am Central isn’t always an optimal time for everyone. You may need a time that’s later in the day. Wednesday may even be a day that doesn’t work at all.

Our solution: webinars by schedule! Starting today, you can schedule a webinar with us on a more extensive variety of days and times. Scheduling allows us to talk to you when it’s more convenient, and get your questions answered by the very same people that build Simple In/Out every single day.

Webinars aren’t a replacement for our Help Center, which is still the best way to find answers to your questions quickly. Our email support is also a way to get specific answers rapidly, and we’re not changing our ongoing commitment of turning around your emails in minutes and not days. Webinars are another option to get the most out of Simple In/Out, and we look forward to speaking with many of your directly in the future.

Three weeks ago, we announced our Simple In/Out Public Beta program. This new initiative allows our customers to utilize our upcoming features before the general public, provide feedback, and grant us insight into how our new features work. Within the past few weeks, we’ve already identified a few bugs and enhancements for the next prominent feature we intend to ship: a new automatic updating system for Beacons and Networks.

Hot on the heels of our Android beta, today we’re opening the beta to iOS users. Our iPhone app will be taking advantage of this new system for Beacons. Unfortunately, Apple still does not provide a way for us to ship our amazing Networks feature for iOS. It’s disappointing.

If you’re a Simple In/Out iPhone user using Beacons 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.

It’s 2019, and we can’t wait to show everyone what we have in store for the new year.

2018 was a year where we spent a great deal of time on the very core of Simple In/Out. While we shipped features and improved Simple In/Out in many dramatic ways, we set the table for some fundamental changes we hope to make this year. We think our customers will be elated with some of the new things we have in store.

We travel to the office every day and work hard on Simple In/Out because we have the best customers around. Thanks to every user of Simple In/Out! We look forward to delighting you in 2019.

Here are just a few of the most prominent features we delivered in 2018.

New Status Indicators

We started the year with new status indicators. Of all the changes we made in 2018, this may have been the most welcome by our users. It was undoubtedly the most public-facing change, and the result was a significant improvement.

Roles: Wrangling User Permissions

The most significant change we made from a coding perspective was roles. Roles gathered all the settings for what a user can perform and placed them in one spot. Roles added a tremendous amount of power for administrators to tailor permissions for specific users and use these roles over and over again. Roles also enabled us to ship permissions that were not possible before: like allowing individual user access to reports, last updated times, and even access to the entire board itself.

Access to the entire board itself in particular opened up several new use cases within Simple In/Out. For companies with outside contractors, or student programs, you could have users update their status right from their phone without allowing them to see the statuses of everyone in the organization.

APIv4: More Power for Developers

With roles, we also released the next version of our API. With this release came a number of changes, the most significant being fine-grained control over date/time searching through past statuses.

GDPR and Privacy Shield

In the Spring of 2018, the European privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect. We have always had a stellar record of supporting user privacy, so we enthusiastically support more privacy regulations to level the playing field between companies like us that care immensely about privacy and others that may not. We fully comply with the GDPR.

We also went a step farther and joined Privacy Shield, the EU/Swiss/US framework honoring standards when collecting, using, and retaining personal information.

We’re thrilled with the path we’re on, and even more excited to show you what’s next. While we technically started our Public Beta program in 2019, watch that space to see new developments coming soon. Until then, thanks again for using Simple In/Out!

It’s 2019 and boy are we excited! A year-end summary of 2018 will be coming shortly, but we’ve been working hard on some significant changes to some of our most prominent features in Simple In/Out.

One of the most widely used features within Simple In/Out is automatic updates from your phone. The power of having your phone keep the board up-to-date for you is both helpful and a real time-saver. In fact, it’s what put Simple In/Out on the map back in 2011.

While automatic updates are in use by a lot of customers right now, we feel we can do better. Last Summer, we sat down and discussed how we could make automatic updates both more accessible and more reliable while simultaneously keeping our long-standing commitment to user privacy. This past Fall, we began work on rewriting the core functionality from the ground-up to accomplish this goal. The result, while not ready to be unveiled today, is shaping up to meet our goals nicely.

That brings us to today and the announcement of our new Public Beta program. This will allow users that are adventurous to install and try cutting-edge new features before the general public. Beta users will help guide many new features and make their voices heard. We also benefit by seeing our new code work in the wild before we ship. Software that is more feature rich and stable will be the ultimate result.

We’re starting today with a beta of the new automatic updating features for both Beacons and Networks with our Android phone app. In the future, we’ll add iOS Beacons as well. If you’re using our Beacons or Networks now and are interested in seeing the new changes we have in store, head over to the Public Beta page to contact us.

This is just the beginning of projects that will see a beta release before an official launch. Just last week, we broke ground on a brand new project that we hope to have in beta before the golf season is upon us.

Here’s to a great 2019!

It’s been a while since our last blog post about new Simple In/Out features, but rest assured we’ve been busy. Since last December we’ve been hard at work on a particular new feature that we’ve just shipped. We’re proud to announce a major change to the way Simple In/Out understands user permissions: Roles.

Roles in Simple In/Out offer more fine-grained control over which users can view/edit various things, all the while making it easier than ever to understand why a user can or cannot perform an action. Before today, users has three switches: admin, managing the status of other users, managing your own status. The company also had various options to determine which of the user types could do which things.

Now with roles, we’ve moved almost all of those choices to user roles. Each user in your company belongs to one role. This gives administrators one place to determine which users can do which things. Have a need to allow a user to manage your billing? Create a Billing role and assign your accounting users to it. Need to allow managers to run reports on others but not allow them to add and delete users? Create a department head role with reporting options and assign your managers to it. The possibilities are many.

With this change, we’re also announcing a new permission in roles that has been a big request from our customers: the ability to hide the board entirely from some users. The use case is having users that should have accounts and should update their status, but for security reasons they shouldn’t be able to view other users and their statuses. Perhaps you have a contractor and you want to hide the list of actual employees. Perhaps your users are students within an after-school program and viewing other student statuses isn’t desired. Simple In/Out will now allow you to have users in a role that cannot see other users, but can still do things like update their status, run reports on themselves on the website, etc.

Roles and hiding the board from users have been several months in the making but they lay the groundwork for big new features we plan to build in the future. We’re also very excited for everyone to see what we’re working on next.