Computerworld: Don't miss out on Highrise

Computerworld.com published a list of 11 sites not to miss. On the list: Highrise.

Highrise keeps track of your relationship with your customers, providing a place to track and share their contact information, background notes and records of interactions.

Highrise is an online CRM tool. Basically, it's an easy-to-use database for contacts, reminders and notes. Because it's online, you can share it across your company or team anywhere there is access to a browser.

Highrise offers a free account for up to two users that can store 250 contacts, a Max account at $149 per month for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts, and several levels in between. You can even forward e-mails to a drop box associated with your account, and Highrise adds it as a note on the sender's or recipient's contact page, along with any attached files.

See the full list.

Improved Backpack Calendar Reminders

By popular request, last night we pushed an update which allows you to notify everyone, select people, or just you via email/sms of an event on the Backpack Calendar. Prior to this update, everyone in your account was notified on every event. That lead to a lot of unnecessary notification.

Notify me

Notify everyone

Notify just some people

We hope you find the improved notification system useful.
Thanks for your continued support.

[Case Study] Chi-Town Daily News uses Highrise to manage newsroom

In "No Casual Operation: Inside a Citizen Journalism Newsroom" [Poynter.org], Geoff Dougherty, Editor of Chi-Town Daily News, talks about using Highrise to manage his newsroom.

Managing three dozen inexperienced journalists who work remotely to cover a city like Chicago is no easy task. We've had to think carefully about developing procedures to make sure that people and stories don't fall through the cracks.

A big part of that system is Highrise, Web-based software that was designed for customer-relationship management. It has turned out to be unexpectedly well-suited to managing a newsroom.

While many volunteer-driven organizations run on a casual, catch-as-catch-can basis, we needed to keep everyone in our office updated on what our volunteers were doing -- who was looking for a story, who was supposed to be filing this week, and who needed a phone call to make sure they were still on board.

Highrise enables us to collect contact details on our volunteers in one location, assign the volunteer to an editor, track stories to completion and send automated reminders when deadlines are missed.

When a prospective volunteer contacts Frank, he schedules a meeting to explain how the program works, sets the volunteer up with a username on our content management system, finds out what she's interested in covering, and assigns her to one of our two editors. He also tags volunteers by neighborhood in Highrise, which makes it easy for us to match writers with breaking news or other coverage opportunities.

Frank creates a Highrise task for the editor, who then follows up with a phone call or e-mail suggesting a couple of story possibilities to the writer. We've found that covering a meeting is a great first assignment for our volunteers, most of whom have no prior journalism experience or training.

Because the meetings occur at a fixed time and location, they eliminate the possibility of procrastination. The meetings, and the resulting stories, follow a predictable format, so we can provide some tips and and examples to the writer before she arrives at the meeting.

And because we're familiar with what usually goes on at those meetings, we're in a good position to spot accuracy problems in stories about them.

Many of our story ideas are drawn from an online civic calendar we created to keep track of the thousands of Local School Council meetings, community policing gatherings and other neighborhood events that occur in Chicago every year. The calendar is searchable by address, so it's easy for editors and writers to find upcoming events in a particular neighborhood.

Once we've talked over the story with the writer, we use Highrise to track deadlines and progress. Highrise allows us to automatically store e-mails to our writers with their other details, so we can instantly pull up someone's profile and see what he's working on and what kind of progress he's making.

Our system also allows us to follow up with writers who, for whatever reason, have missed a deadline or disappeared from view. After two or three attempts at contact, editors assign the writer back to Frank, who follows up to find out if the volunteer is still interested in working with us.

As we fine-tune this system and expand our volunteer network to cover the rest of Chicago, we're looking to sharpen our ability to respond to breaking news.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

[Case Study] Baltimore Sun uses Basecamp to manage "a million moving parts"

Tim Windsor, General Manager of The Baltimore Sun's online division, wrote to tell us that "Basecamp is a beneficial infection."

So we brought Basecamp in to the interactive creative department.

And then we introduced it to the product development team. Where someone from IT saw it and now is asking where to sign up.

Basecamp is a beneficial virus. Once it's unleashed on an organization, it's bound to grow and replicate.

Below, Thom Smith, Director of Design & Development for The Baltimore Sun, answers questions about how his team uses Basecamp.

How do you use Basecamp?
My Department operates as a mini creative agency within the greater organization of The Baltimore Sun Media Group. We do design and development work for clients both internally and externally. This work spans most media and includes: web sites (big and small), banner ads, e-mail newsletters, admail, video production, logos, illustrations, print ads, tradeshow signage, etc. This keeps us pretty busy and we use Basecamp to manage all of our projects from start to finish.

Which feature(s) do you use most?
Milestones and messages are the most important tools to us. The ability to assign those to members of my team is extremely helpful as well.

We create a new project for each of our clients. Then we break down each job into its component parts. Each of these deliverables is a milestone assigned to a member of my team. They get their instruction in the form of a message that is associated to the milestone. These details are added by our traffic coordinator who works with our clients to assess needs.

We also use the file upload tool to share large files, like video, for our clients to proof. It's so much easier than trying to get them to use ftp.

Why are you a Basecamp evangelist?
We love Basecamp because it's so simple. It takes very little time to learn and is easy to teach to new employees and clients. It's also extremely flexible. The tools are useful and intuitive, so regardless of the type of business you're doing, you can adapt Basecamp to suit your needs. That's why I've reccomended Basecamp to so many people. There are many units in our corporation who use Basecamp now and as more people are exposed to it, they see how it could be a good tool for their own departments.

Tips for getting the most out of Backpack on the iPhone

Just Another iPhone Blog recently posted "Tips and Tweaks Make 37signals’ Backpack A 'Must Have' iPhone Application." It discusses using iBackpack to make your Backpack pages look nice on your iPhone and also links to a Forum post that shows how to add a custom Backpack icon to your iPhone home screen.

I came to Backpack to solve a specific work issue/need but am finding it to be an incredibly powerful and useful web-based application. I now use it to communicate with my colleagues and reduce the amount of “telephone” we play when information is incorrectly transmitted. I use it to collect pictures, manage a to do list, store files and documents for easy access anywhere anytime. I used it to collect ideas, information, slides and random thoughts as I prepared a talk I gave at a conference last week. Best of all, it is not only powerful but it is easy to use. In fact, it is the first time I pushed my colleagues toward a new technology that they did not initially curse me about.

The problem is- while Backpack’s pages are fully accessible from an iPhone or iPod Touch they are a bit too difficult to manipulate easily.

Fortunately, some incredibly smart folks have created some amazing “add-ons” that make Backpack one of the most iPhone-friendly and powerful applications around.

Justin Michael at violetpixel.com as created iBackpack. iBackpack is code that optimizes Backpack pages for viewing and use on an iPhone. He has posted screen caps on his site that show the difference...

Justin’s code make each page easily accessible, fully readable. It makes adding, editing and changing the information on a page a breeze. It makes Backpack one of, if not the, best iPhone organizational tools around.

But that left an additional issue. Once I optimized my pages using iBackpack I created direct links to some of my most-used Backpack pages on my home screen. They work great but look downright ugly.

Luckily Grettir Asmundarson at tinypineapple.com created a lovely little iPhone icon and has shared it with anyone who wants it.

Now Backpack works great AND looks great on my iPhone. It has become my most important organizational application in a short period of time and I have no doubt that will only increase as 37signals and other creative folks find new and powerful uses for it.

How do you add that custom Backpack icon to your iPhone home screen? Grettir offers step-by-step instructions at the Backpack Forum.

[Case Study] Shaw Builders creates multimillion dollar homes with Basecamp

Bob Moore commented at Signal vs. Noise about how Shaw Builders, his home-building company, uses Basecamp.

We use Basecamp to help manage the complex process of building custom homes. We work with a wide range of talented architects, interior designers, engineers, landscape architects, masons, electricians, plumbers, HVAC contractors. Our clients range from Wall Street Exec's (super type A's) to Hollywood celebs. If they actually had to take the time to "learn" how to use Basecamp, they wouldn't use it. Sometimes a simple tool can solve a wide variety of major problems and Basecamp does that for us.

We followed up with Bob to learn more about how his team uses Basecamp.

How do you use Basecamp and why do you like it?
We're a high end custom home builder with a staff of around 50 people. This includes office personnel, site project managers, lead carpenters, finish carpenters, masons, cabinetmakers and laborers. A typical project is in the area of $ 3 million to $ 8 million dollars. We normally have 4 to 5 projects running at any given time. Each project has it's own dedicated project manager who has P&L responsibilities for their project. The project team also includes architects, civil engineers, mechanical engineers, interior designers, landscape architects and sub-contractors for HVAC, electrical, plumbing, etc. There's a ton of information to manage and track. This is where Basecamp comes in. We use it to track project to do lists, project milestones, Project logs, Builders Reports and photos. We post photos almost on a daily basis. The architects and homeowners love the fact that they can check on the project from anywhere in the world.
 
I'm a huge fan of hosted applications. Fewer management headaches for me! I like Basecamp because it's simple for everyone to use yet powerful enough to allow us to do the things we need to. For example, I use Google's Picasa to post our photos and link to slideshows right from Basecamp. I haven't run into a lot of limitations. Our customers range from the hyper Wall Steet type "A"'s to Hollywood artists and celebrities. If they felt at all intimidated by Basecamp, they wouldn't use it. We haven't run into that.

Backpack is "killer" according to Business II Business

Blair O'Neil, co-owner of Integris Marketing, recently named Backpack the featured business resource at the Business II Business networking group's site.

Backpack now comes in a multi-user version that really makes this tool more like an powerful, on-demand, simple to use, Intranet for small business. You can create as many users as you like (price varies with number of users) and each user can have their own calendars, effectively creating an online sharable calendaring system. The newsroom feature is a like an activity dashboard that also keeps group messaging tidy...

I really think it’s killer when combined with Basecamp. If you use multiple offerings from 37signals, one tip I would suggest is to get an OpenID and use it to log in to your accounts and then you will have the ability to jump back and forth to all of your accounts from a simple dashboard interface.

Try Backpack today.

New project switcher in Basecamp, bigger file upload limit, and more.

Last night we launched a new feature that makes it easier to switch between frequently accessed projects. We've put together a little video tour to show you how it used to work and how it works now.

This release also includes the following improvements:

• People using Basecamp file storage can now upload files up to 100 MB each. Before the limit was 30 MB.
• When you're inside a project you'll see a printer icon in the right corner of the screen next to the Search tab. Clicking that icon will give you a print-friendly version of the page you're currently on.
• We've made some of the text links at the top of the screen bigger so they're easier to see/click.

We hope you'll find these improvements useful and thanks again for your continued support!

Example Basecamp welcome messages from R.BIRD and Koke Creative

Below are a couple of Basecamp welcome messages used by two different design firms. Each welcomes clients to Basecamp and encourages them to use it as their first point of contact. We've left the textile formatting in place.

R.BIRD
R.BIRD is a team of brand consultants with 25 years of experience in packaging design and branding. The company's founder Richard Bird recently sent us the standard Basecamp welcome message template the firm uses. Note the clear explanation of why Basecamp is superior to just sending a regular email.

Welcome!

Welcome to [RBIRD.projectpath.com] where R.BIRD shares important communications and assets for client projects.

* *post new "messages":link *
* *add comments*
* *upload "files":link *
* *talk "live":link *
* *check "to-do lists":link *
* *review "milestone dates":link *
* *collaborate on "writing":link *
* even *subscribe via "RSS":link *

*Security*
Information available here is only accessible by individuals granted access through unique login and password. All communications and file transfers are secured by SSL encryption.

*Your Login*
Keep your username and password in a safe place. You will need them to sign in to the site *and, again, to confirm your identity when accessing files* that may be posted here. (Note: your login and password are case sensitive)

*Think RBIRD.projectpath.com FIRST*
When you use RBIRD.projectpath.com:
* you can notify your entire project team
* there is a shared record of your communication
* all of us at R.BIRD share responsibility for your message
* the possibility that your message is missed is virtually eliminated.

*When you use Email:*
* only one person might receive and read your message
* your teams and colleagues may remain in the dark
* there is no record of your communication, except in your own Email out box
* there exists the possibility that your message may be missed.

RBIRD.projectpath.com is a wonderfully successful addition to the R.BIRD suite of project management tools. *Please use RBIRD.projectpath.com as your _first_ point of project communications with R.BIRD.*

For Team Leaders

If additional members of your team need to be added to this project site, simply provide contact information. For convenience, you can "use this form to provide new or updated contact information.":http://example.wufoo.com/forms/project-contact-form/

Richard adds, "I copy project-specific links into the 'link' references. The template even includes an online form that we all use to add new users."

Koke Creative
Jeff Koke at Koke Creative also sent along his welcome message (after the jump).

[Case Study] Author and conflict resolution consultant uses Backpack as "business home-base and sanity tool"

Tammy Lenski uses Backpack to run her conflict resolution firm, Tammy Lenski LLC, and manage client and business projects. She recently released a new book and Backpack is the foundation for her marketing campaign and virtual book tour. Below, she answers a few questions about her use of Backpack.

How do you use Backpack and why do you like it?
My business is a full-service conflict resolution consulting firm for individuals and organizations. That means I offer a mix of services from speaking engagements to seminars and one-on-one coaching to professional mediation. I also blog about conflict resolution at Conflict Zen and about running a conflict resolution business at Mediator Tech. My business is mobile, so I go on-site with clients and use my home office on days I'm not traveling.

Backpack is my business home-base and my sanity tool to manage it all. It's set to load when I open my browser each day because I do almost all my administrative work from Backpack. I love that I can access my project files from any Internet-connected computer and from my iPhone. And I love that everything I need for a client or business project is in one place. When I'm busy or on the road, that helps keep me organized so I can give my full attention and energy to my clients.

Which features do you use most?
I use the Lists and Notes sections every single day, because Backpack is my hybrid GTD/project management tool. I use the Dashboard to keep me focused on big business goals and major goals for the day, and create pages for everything from my annual marketing plan and website updates needed to business projects and travel itineraries. I also use the forward-email-to-Backpack feature to make sure that the most important exchanges about a project are also in the same place as other project files and notes.

What did you use before and why did you switch?
I used a combination of online task lists, Google home page, and Google docs before Backpack. It always felt cobbled together and I wanted a "one-stop" experience for my projects and business planning. I value elegant simplicity -- that's the way I work as a consultant and coach, and it's the way I want to navigate my own work -- and my prior system certainly wasn't elegant or simple! Backpack is. I don't want tons of bells and whistles I'll rarely use, I want a few key features done really well.