We've heard from many of our customers that we need to do a better job highlighting ongoing improvements to the OuterSpatial product, so this is our first attempt at posting a more regular product update. We plan on posting these at least every quarter — and perhaps more frequently if we have important stuff to highlight. You can, of course, always find more detail about every product release in our running release notes (Manager, Mobile, and Web), but we'll use this opportunity to summarize all the new stuff and enhancements in a quick and easy read.

OuterSpatial Web

Our new visitor-facing website is now live at www.outerspatial.com!

The goal for this initial release was to get most of the content that's available in OuterSpatial Mobile out on the web in a search engine optimized way and make it easy for visitors to transition from a web page into the mobile app. The new website will increase the visibility of your organization's OuterSpatial data and content, and this will, in turn, push more visitors into the mobile app — ultimately broadening the reach of your organization and increasing visitor engagement.

This 1.0 release of OuterSpatial Web is just the beginning. We plan on adding interactive maps, trip planning tools, and more to the website soon... so stay tuned!

Challenges

You can now create challenges in OuterSpatial to engage with your visitors and encourage them to get outside in new and exciting ways. A few examples of challenges our organization partners have already created include: hunter check-in/out in Hawai'i, a backcountry camping survey in Yosemite National Park, and a trails challenge for visitors in New Hampshire.

A few details:

• Challenges are made up of one or more "questionnaire" or "check-in" task.
• Visitors participate in a challenge by completing one or more of these tasks, and they "complete" the challenge once they get to the completion level set for the challenge. (For instance, once they check-in to 6 out of 10 trails that are part of a trails challenge.)
• Once a challenge is live, your organization's team members can download a real-time snapshot of all the challenge responses in the "Challenges" section of Manager.

Read more about challenges in our knowledge base and get in touch to launch your first challenge!

Other Improvements

As usual, we also made a number of smaller, more incremental improvements across our product over the last couple of months. Some highlights:

• When creating an outing in Manager, you can now add a stop to it by manually typing in a lat/lng.
• When you create an article in Manager, it now gets designated as "Draft". You can then "Publish" it to make it available in Mobile/Web and then "Archive" it to take it back out of Mobile /Web.
• Tags that are part of a trail's segments (and are, therefore, automatically applied to the trail) are now surfaced in the trail form in Manager.
• Visitors can now update their email address and request account deletion without leaving the OuterSpatial app.
• We now send email notifications to visitors (and your organization's team members) if a post they create — or thread they're participating in — is commented on. This is just the beginning for notifications; we plan to implement more types of notifications and support for push notifications soon.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to reach out to our customer success team.