Simpleweb Playground: Solving problems and squeezing pimples

The Simpleweb Playground is our place where ideas come to life, of play and experimentation, basically it’s much more fun than GDPR, although ironically that did form the basis of our latest Playground project.

The effects of the GDPR for many may resemble a pimple, tackling it could result in a bit of a mess. However, unlike a pimple (and like your wise elders used to say) it’s not going to just go away of its own accord if you leave it alone.

The thing is, businesses use so many tools on a day to day basis in order to make life easier that inevitably, data isn’t just stored in one easy to access location. Slack, Basecamp, Gmail, FreeAgent, Pipedrive are just a few of the tools we use here at Simpleweb, all with the potential to be storing personal data, and all of which we would need to search and pull data from, if requested.

This was the problem that inspired Simpleweb CEO Mark to write a brief for developer Andy and CTO Tom.

The concept was simple, how do we bring together personal data from multiple locations and make it easy to deliver on demand?

The proof is in the pimple

Within a few days, we’d proved the concept and Pimple was bornSimplistically speaking, Pimple is a people management tool, here’s how it works:

• Searches for people across all of your connected services
• Creates an “internal” view of every person that your business deals with
• Creates a customer/person profile with data pulled from invoicing, CRM, sent and received emails, project management and whatever else you can connect
• In a single click allows you to collate, export and send (securely) everything to your customer on request

So, when it comes to GDPR there’s no need for teams to learn new skills in order to try and retrieve data. Data and the process around accessing it becomes more transparent, valuable time is saved and customers get peace of mind that their data is being taken care of.

So far, Andy has connected two services (Google and Pipedrive) to form a POC, which proves that it works. We’ve now added another Simpleweb developer, Joe, to ‘plugin’ Basecamp functionality and in time, add the ability to ‘plugin’ more.

This project is the perfect example of why we love the Simpleweb Playground, it’s our opportunity to take real-life problems (like GDPR), learn from them and see how we might be able to do something more efficiently.

So in the case of GDPR, and the barrage of emails from businesses keen to show they’re toeing the line (even Rage Against The Machine are complying!), you have to ask, how many of them actually have suitable systems in place to allow them to deliver personal data efficiently, if requested?

If we can help squeeze that GDPR pimple, all the better!