We’re launching something new today: the Rise Ambassador Program. A fancy name for rewarding anyone bringing their team (or any other team too, that’s fine). We know transitioning between tools can be a hurdle, and the best person to advocate for a better tool is someone on the team. We already see that happening, and we think it’s so valuable that we want to reward that.

The Rise Ambassador Program

In addition, we have a bunch of ideas for resources to make being an ambassador even better — in our view you’re not an ambassador for Rise, but an ambassador for better work.

On to the updates:

One place for things that change with the new updates section

You now have an official ‘Updates’ section in Rise (also accessible by tying G and then U on your keyboard). When a task you’ve subscribed to changes, you’ll be notified right there. It’s a great way to stay in the loop, without leaving Rise.

Meeting Boards for Outlook

We finalized and unlocked support for creating meeting boards for Outlook accounts. The reason for delaying it a bit is that we needed a good way to identify all relevant recurring events, across accounts, which was a fun challenge. But now that all works, and if you're on Outlook you should see the button to create a new Meeting Board appear for repeating events. For now we limit the feature to the events where everyone is part of your domain, to make sure you're not giving others outside your organization access.

Other changes and improvements

• Improvement: when creating a Meeting Board, we now no longer automatically email everyone but instead ask you if we should do that
• Improvement: when you reschedule a task that was planned for a time, we now reset the time so it will jump to all day instead
• Improvement: you can now copy the link to a task and project via the dots menu
• Improvement: in list view, the project labels are now buttons with dropdown menus so you can quickly change various properties from there
• Fixed: when you would press cmd+enter (or control+enter) when adding a new subtask, the sidebar would close instead of saving and allowing you to keep adding subtasks

With the addition of Projects to Rise, we are closing one of the bigger pain points for teams: not having one overview of what is important. Meeting boards are a great way to link work with events. Odyss is a team that decided to completely move their operations to Rise a few months ago, and we sat down with the CTO to hear how they make the most of Rise in their day to day. Here's the full interview with Nolan from Odyss. We're happy to help onboard the rest of your team too -- let us know if you need help with that.

Show all project tasks in your calendar

In the last update we introduced a feature which allows you to mark projects as favorite. Now you can also toggle all tasks for one of your favorites and have all project tasks, not just the ones assigned to yourself, show up in your calendar. Whether it's to quickly see what the rest of your team is up to, check a shared content calendar or use a project to track who is on holiday--you can have it all.

Meeting board inline tasks

Meeting boards are our way to help keep your repeating events on track. They are there right where you need them, and checking what is left to do is a quick glance away.

We have improved meeting boards a bit more by not just linking a board view, but pulling in the most relevant tasks. They are now showing up in the hovercard, as well as in the sidebar. It is also there where you can use our new inline add to jot down things that need doing.

Quick add in My Focus

Continuing on the theme of making it easier to add new items: My Focus now also allows you to add new tasks without having to switch to the popup to do that.

My Focus is a bit our ‘playing area’, where we can mix different concepts to help you stay on track – improving the ability to quickly organize and rearrange your day is one of them. This is also why we decided to make the inline add a bit smarter: it will add it right after the last planned task for the day.

Improvements and fixes

• Improvement: events that span multiple days but are not marked as all day are now by default added to the all day section.
• Improvement: improved left sidebar navigation by merging the two, confusing buttons, into one
• Improvement: it is now possible to set or update the scheduled time for task from the details panel
• Improvement: on Mac, you can now make the menu bar automatically switch to a ‘small’ variant (just the Rise icon) when there are no upcoming meetings (settings → menu bar)
• Fixed: when creating an event in an Outlook calendar, we no longer send multiple emails when the Zoom meeting is attached
• Fixed: we would not take default conferencing solution into account for Outlook calendars
• Fixed: when opening the calendar of a colleague, we now show their scheduled tasks too (the ones you have access to) and we show them in the correct color
• Fixed: after changing the selection of smart-color coding, the settings would show the same color twice
• Fixed: render a changelog item for a task when the description is added or changed
• Fixed: My Focus badge incorrectly included done tasks in the open tasks badge
• Fixed: preserve ordering of subtasks when marking a recurring parent task as complete

We're back at it with improvements that help you sail through your day, wherever you are.

Rise for Android is here

We've worked hard on processing all your feedback about our Android app, and we're super happy to share you can get it now on the Google Play store. It comes with fast and smooth navigation, a really nice one, two or three day view and fast access to your scheduling links. As a little bonus, just like on iOS, a long press on the plus button allows you you quickly drop a task for processing later.

Favorite projects

Working with tasks in Rise is already pretty smooth, but we have big plans for projects. One of the things you've mentioned is that it would be great to have the ability to pin a few key projects to have quick access, so that's what we've shipped. Head over to any project and click the star icon in the top right to have it be visible wherever you are in Rise.

Other fixes and improvements

• Improvement: it is now possible to get rid of the "No more events today" and "No upcoming events" in your menu bar (head over to Settings → Menu bar and toggle "Hide menu bar when there are no events")
• Improvement: we introduced more granular settings to expose task titles, and because of that we decided to switch to exposing titles by default for new accounts
• Improvement: adding a task by clicking the plus button at the top of each column in the board view now adds the task at the top of the column
• Improvement: we've tweaked the highlight of the number of open tasks in the left sidebar, and we are now showing both the open items in your Inbox, as well as the open tasks in My Focus
• Improvement: you can now move a task back to your private workspace from the project dropdown in any task
• Improvement: we now highlight the fact that you have set a custom display timezone when editing the custom times in a scheduling link, which could lead to frustrating edits
• Improvement: for those who want to get our updates in a different fashion, we're now expose our posts and updates in RSS too! You can find the link on our changelog and blog
• Fixed: event type tabs break layout when scroll bar is visible – this is now handled correctly
• Fixed (Android): notifications now also trigger when the app is not in the foreground
• Fixed (Android): overlays no longer show a white background
• Fixed (Android): improve performance of opening events and tasks
• Fixed: copy task link shortcut also triggered opening the settings
• Fixed: adding a comment to a task would incorrectly mention the creator of the task as the commenter instead of the commenter

We shipped a lot of bigger and smaller changes across Rise in the last two weeks, improving reliability, stability and continuing on our path to make Rise not just a fantastic calendar but a brilliant project manager, too.

Besides building Rise we've also launched something new: FocusTime. It's a series on our blog where we interview fun people about how they think about time. The first two episodes are out: we spoke with Samuel Beek who highlights his one hour slot to tackle all loose ends and chatted with Derk Oosterveld about his weekly review. Enjoy!

Syncing task titles into your calendar

Biggest things on your lists: adding the option to expose task titles into your calendar. In your settings, you can now enable exposing those titles for each workspace. We've done something extra though: we leverage the visibility/privacy field on your events and we'll automatically mark events as private if not everyone in the workspace has access to the task in Rise. So for example: tasks you're creating in a meeting board, or tasks that are created within a team (you can create as many teams within your workspace for private projects) are for your eyes only. To make it even better we even show a little checkmark in the event to indicate your status.

If you don't need the tasks visible and blocked in your Google or Outlook calendar, you can also select 'None' as an option.

We also no longer create events for tasks that are visible in your all day section in Rise, since we feel it mostly adds clutter. We are always trying to go for sensible defaults instead of adding settings for things like this. Do reach out if your workflow is different and we're happy to consider.

Task changelog

When working and collaborating on tasks, you often want to see who did what. The new task changelog shows you everything you need to know at a glance.

Flexible access scopes for Outlook

With our Google integration, you can specify exactly which data you want us to request. Some of you don't feel comfortable sharing contact information, so we have an option for that. We've made these changes available for Outlook accounts too. Also convenient since some organizations block off complete access when any application is requesting sensitive data. If that was the case and you want to give the integration another go, this is a good time to try it.

Additionally we also added the option to include 'other contacts' for Outlook, which contain contacts you've interacted with over email or chat.

Connect your Outlook account

Smaller improvements and fixes

• Improvement: added week number to calendar view on desktop
• Improvement: when adding tasks in any board view, you can now continue adding tasks by pressing enter
• Improvement: tasks now correctly copy the smart-color coding color when this setting is enabled
• Improvement: list view for tasks now contains a plus button for each section to quickly add a task
• Improvement: projects and workspaces are now consistently ordered across Rise
• Improvement: added a nice little dynamic time of day image to your My Focus view
• Fixed: when using your personal email inbox for tasks we now copy over the contents of the email into the description. We now also support picking up tasks where your inbox email is added to the bcc field
• Fixed: scheduling links now show up to 16 slots per day, instead of the previous limit of 8
• Fixed: all day event text is now correctly truncated on mobile
• Fixed: if you use custom statuses, the grouping in the Tasks page now work correctly (it will group tasks by status label and makes sure the statuses are correctly applied when you move tasks around)
• Fixed: if you move a task between workspaces, the statuses are correctly changed as well
• Fixed: new instances of recurring tasks did not end up in the correct project, now they do
• Fixed: you can now select a custom recurrence interval for events longer than 31 days
• Fixed: one off scheduling links now ignore blocking all day events
• Fixed: option+drag does not copy over the project the task was in, that works correctly now
• Fixed: clicking back button in settings now correctly takes you back to the page you expect to go back to outside of your settings

Before we dive in: last week we streamed our weekly internal demo. It's the highlight of the team and we thought it would be an interesting experiment to share it.

Custom task statuses

We now support creating multiple statuses for each workspace, so you can set up more complex workflows. Head over to your workspace settings to create or update your configuration so it matches exactly what you need.

Scheduling links on mobile and in the menu bar

Rise for mobile now contains a quick way of accessing a copy of your scheduling links: tap Settings → Scheduling links for fast access to share a link over chat or email. We also added the same feature to the menu bar app, so your scheduling links are always just a few clicks away.

Saving view settings for each project

You could already change the view of Projects and the Tasks in Rise, but now we're saving these settings separately. This makes it easy to customize each view and configure it just as you like it.

Also, good to know: change the grouping of a project to 'Custom groups' to create your own custom columns for your tasks.

Other fixes and improvements

• Improvement: clicking in the all day section in My Focus creates a new task
• Improvement: deleting a custom group for a project now asks to confirm before deleting the group
• Fixed: the mobile app would sometimes not (correctly) refresh data when the app was opened
• Fixed: back button in settings would behave like a back button within settings instead of taking you back to the main screen

We have big news for you today: we’re moving the next phase of Rise into Public Beta. You are part of this group that gets access early, as we prepare for officially announcing this version of Rise to the world. If you refresh (click the View → Reload menu option) Rise, you’ll meet our take on projects and tasks.

We believe that if you want to improve your decisions about how you’re spending your time, bringing everything you’re working on together in one place is absolutely crucial. So that's why, since the earliest days of Rise, we have been dreaming about closing the gap between your tasks and your meetings.

But we won't stop there. We've built this next phase of Rise with your team in mind. Because we believe teams can use all the help they can get to stay focused on what is most important.

Here’s what’s unique about Projects & Tasks in Rise:

Seamless integration with your calendar

In Rise you can create, modify and drag tasks around like any other event. This reads like a small thing, but it's surprisingly tricky to get right. We spent a lot of hours making sure it's rock solid.

Setting a due date on a task automatically makes it show up in the all day section, from where you can easily drag it into your schedule. You can also easily duplicate any task with Command+D (or Ctrl+D on Windows), or use Alt+drag to quickly create a copy of your tasks. This does not only work from the calendar, but from anywhere within Rise.

Meeting Boards help have more effective meetings

Ever forgot about one (or more) action items in a recurring meeting? We're bringing those tasks into your calendar, exactly the place where you're reviewing your week. We're introducing this feature as Meeting Boards and it already transformed the quality of our own meetings.

For any internal recurring event, you can create a Meeting Board from Rise with a single click. We'll make sure all attendees (and only they) will get access to that meeting board. In your calendar, you'll see that this event will show a nice progress indicator, highlighting the progress for the meeting. From the board, you can easily add new tasks, assign them to the relevant participant and keep those items on track.

Take the guesswork out of who is doing what and when

A lot of our time is spent in keeping different systems in sync. Managing deadlines and related meetings, copying things over from the team project management tool to your own calendar – not anymore. In Rise you'll have a complete picture of what's happening and updating tasks from your calendar will automatically update the relevant project board.

One view for focus

Mapping out your day is a really powerful way to make sure you're prioritizing what is right. This is why we built My Focus: one page to look at and combine your key tasks with meetings that are coming up. It really quickly became our most favorite page in Rise and we hope you'll love it too.

There's so much more

Those highlights are what makes Rise special, but we support the features you’d expect. You can add labels, custom statuses for your workspace, custom groups in your list or board view, task grouping and sorting, recurring tasks, subtasks, attachments, comments, your personal inbound email address for tasks and so much more. On mobile we managed to sneak in a quick add view by long-pressing the plus button. We did all that while keeping the calendar experience in Rise as clean and uncluttered as possible.

We are on a mission to help teams get more important things done. We deeply care about building a product that is as close to perfection as possible. And we also spend so much time thinking and imagining what the workplace could look like if software was truly built to work for you instead of being that flawed, annoying thing that sits between you and your work.

This is a big step forwards to do that and we hope you’ll love it as much as we do.

We’re excited to announce that we’ve released the official Rise for iOS app today.

It contains just what you need to see what’s up next, to quickly launch into calls or navigation. It comes with notifications, butter smooth dragging and the care for details you know us for.

But hey, don’t take our word for it. Here are a few of our users about the app:

“Finally a calendar app that is truly powerful because of its simplicity.” – Vincent Tuinema

"When passion and love are the main ingredients, you get a powerful yet simply beautiful calendar app like Rise." – Carlos Aquino

"Tried the plethora of new calendar apps... but Rise outshines them through their clean, intuitive and still aesthetically beautiful interface. And beyond that - they have a stellar customer support that puts users first" – Edwin Laagland

We’d love to hear what you think.

PS What about Android, you say? Got some great news there: we’re opening up the Alpha of Rise for Android today, too. Leave your email address to get access.

Other changes and improvements

• Improvement: external scheduling links now give bookers the option to share a few notes about what they want to talk about
• Improvement: the menu bar app for mac now has an option to toggle between showing the title of your next event and a smaller variant where it will just show the Rise logo, to take up less space
• Improvement: one-off scheduling links no longer respect working times, which we thought would be convenient but turned out to result in complaints that certain slots were not available for bookers
• Improvement: the mobile app will now correctly identify the timezone of the device and instantly adapt to it, as well as making sure all references in notifications are updated too
• Improvement: we moved the view options on mobile to a separate sheet and introduced a plus button to quickly create new events
• Improvement: you can now pick your favorite maps app to open location links in, on both our desktop app and our mobile apps
• Improvement: if you have access to your teammates calendar in Outlook, we are now also able to fetch and display those details in Rise
• Improvement: you can now add Microsoft Teams links to events if you’re on Outlook, as well as Skype and Skype for Business
• Fixed: notifications on iOS would never trigger a sound
• Fixed: after adding a second (or third) calendar account, the dialog would stay open which gave the impression that it didn’t work
• Fixed: clicking best time to meet event in calendar would not replace it with a normal event
• Fixed: mobile app could crash after tapping a notification for an event that no longer exists at the time of tapping

We've not been sitting on our hands. Here's an overview of our changes for this week:

Custom working times schedule for scheduling links

Our scheduling links feature got a long-awaited upgrade: you can now specify custom time schedules for each link. Those are what we consider the available times for that link, so you can use it to create links that allow booking in part of your workweek, evenings, weekends – whatever you need.

Moved calendar selection to the top navigation and combined schedule button

Some already noticed a much cleaner left sidebar and reached out to ask where their calendars went. They got a new place in a menu item on the top right of your screen. We’re reorganizing a few things in the left bar for future upgrades and when we tried this it felt good right away.

In addition we also combined "Availability" and "Meet" into a single button which now contains the three key features of scheduling in Rise: Scheduling links, Share availability and Meet.

iOS changes

Thanks to all of you sharing feedback on the app. We’re working our way through a long list of feedback – here are the most notable changes:

• Updated the header of the app and moved the settings link to the top
• Added a plus button to quickly create a new event in the current view
• Allow freeform email input when adding a participant to an event
• Fixed height and smaller visual changes in the calendar selection screen
• Fixed: noted field would not always detect HTML content correctly
• Fixed: the app would not always reconnect and refresh data when moved to the foreground

We’re planning on releasing this version of the app as soon as possible, so expect mostly small improvements and bugfixes. With one notable exception that Tim is finalizing currently: drag&drop!

We’re discontinuing flexible events

Sometimes you have to make a decision that hurts. This is one of them. After thinking about it for a long time, we decided to pull the plug on flexible events in Rise and we’ll completely remove the feature.

We’ll stop doing the daily runs today, and we’ll make sure to clean up after ourselves and return your events to their original state. If you’ve been using our Lunch feature this means we will also remove that event from your calendar to not leave any weird traces.

We invested hundreds, if not thousands, of hours into getting Flexible events right. And while we love it ourselves and will miss the optimizations, the majority of our users didn’t like it. Or in some cases they liked it themselves, but got questions by teammates – not on Rise – why their schedule kept changing.

Optimizing schedules is not something that is fixed. We know that there are hundreds of hours of precious time “lost” because of fragmented schedules. We know there are dozens of scheduling conflicts that are annoying to handle and we could have resolved automatically. It’s a real and very painful problem. But: if you feel you’re losing control over your schedule, you (nearly) missed a meeting because of something we did or had to correct a weird move, we completely understand that we lost you.

At some point, we might go back to the drawing board and try to come up with something that does work. For now, we want to thank everyone who tried it with us, rolled it out in their team on their own or was part of any of our experiments to onboard complete teams. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Other changes and improvements

• Fixed: best time to meet events would sometimes be positioned incorrectly and sometimes had a cut off label
• Fixed: FocusGuard would not have the correct setting for automatic declining
• Fixed: when opening the calendar of a teammate who is in a different timezone, but that timezone is already open as an additional timezone, don't mess up the labels of the timezones
• Fixed: Rise would sometimes not respond when clicking on the icon in the dock on macOS
• Fixed: when creating a new event, the meeting room status would not always show up to date information
• Improvement: the email to confirm an external booking now sets a Reply-To header so when hitting reply it ends up with the booker instead of with us

In the past months we’ve been integrating and testing with Microsoft Outlook and we’re really close to giving the first users access to it. Linking your Outlook account to Rise means that all of our key features like cross-calendar blocking, FocusGuard and external scheduling work out of the box. And obviously you’ll get to use the smoothest possible calendar experience on both desktop and iOS, and we have a ton more amazing things in store.

Ready to give Rise a go?

Sign up for the Outlook beta

Looking forward to get you on!

Updates to Rise for iOS

We (well, mostly Tim, or TurboTim as we call him) have been shipping a bunch of really nice updates to that iOS alpha we opened up.

Most importantly: you can now select which calendar you'd like to see in Rise. That was clearly lacking and is nice to have on the go. A few other highlights:

• Like the desktop version, the app now supports adding group participants and seeing the individual responses of group members
• Added a toggle to show or hide the weekend days
• Added a button to email all participants of an event
• Improved meeting room support: like the groups, we now give you instant feedback about its availability when adding a meeting room
• When viewing or editing working location or out of office events, you're now seeing the correct and relevant fields

Three really nice upgrades for you we shipped in the past two weeks.

Smart color-coding

A lot of you are manually coloring their events to make your week easier to scan. But we think there’s some time to be saved there, and that’s why we’re introducing smart color-coding. Enabling it gives you the option to let Rise automatically make certain types of events show up in a specific color. You can highlight tasks, team meetings and external meetings for example, to instantly get a sense of how you are spending your time. Manage smart color-coding in settings.

Out of office events

We got this question a dozen times over the past months: ‘can I create out of office events just like in Google Calendar?’ Well, now you can.

You can now create out of office events and also make use of the auto-decline option. Pick between existing or only new events to be automatically declined, and you can even set a custom message for it.

Auto-join, always

If you are like us – chances are you are too late for virtual meetings often, too. Simply because you’re immersed in something and time just flies. We heard you on making louder and more intense notifications, but we actually think there’s something even better: auto-join.

We had this feature for a while, but you had to enable it for each meeting individually. We removed that and instead turned it into a feature that is just on or off for all your virtual meetings. We found that it completely removes anxiety to forget what’s next. You can manage the settings from the menu bar and in your Conferencing settings.

Other improvements and fixes

• Improvement: FocusGuard blocks are now saved as real Google ‘Focus time’ events. We are working on unlocking custom focus time events for manual blocking too.
• Improvement: sometimes the hovercard for events didn’t show up anymore, it now always will
• Improvement: dragging around events will show an outline of where the event will go, which makes it more friendly to the eyes and has the additional benefit of skipping a lot of calculations – dragging is now a lot smoother for busy calendars
• Improvement: even though Rise was already fast, we spent time improving rendering speed of calendars with a lot of events which especially influences the month view
• Fixed: in some cases, when using another third party calendar service, our cross-calendar blocking could result in a loop. We fixed a bunch of cases and added guards in place to catch those loops faster now.
• Fixed: events and month names rendered incorrectly when no locale is set for user
• Fixed: the new event creation animation, when using Meet F or New event N is really slow