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Want to sync your Highrise contacts with your phone or Gmail or some other address book/device? Tony Mars of Mindovo tips us to Soocial.com, which aims to link disconnected address books to each other. A change in one place result in a change in all your connected devices. Tony uses it as a way to sync his Highrise contacts to his iPhone and says, "They're still in beta but we are one of their testers and so far it works like a charm."
Tobias Christensen wrote to us, "I read your book Getting Real, and found it brilliant!...The nice thing is that now we're able to express more clearly exactly why we are reluctant to include new features, hire more people, answer emails within the hour, etc."
We asked Tobias to tell us more and here's what he wrote:
Getting Real is all about being lean and agile, and keeping things simple, and it's written using this exact philosophy, which works out really well. Getting Real is filled with interesting comments and insights from a large number of businesses, as well as references to the development of 37Signals' own product line.
From my own experience I know it's really easy to overcomplicate things, as your company grows you start adding various control mechanisms, and before you know it your implementing controls mechanisms to control your control mechanisms. Getting Real reminds small businesses why they should stay lean and agile, and why they shouldn't try to overcomplicate things.
Getting Real also gave us some new ideas on the design and development, e.g. the concept of thinking of your application as a person, always asking yourself, 'would this person say or do this?' or the concept of asking users which functions they would like to remove from your application, instead of always asking the exact opposite question.
So to sum things up: Thanks to 37Signals for a great book, and to all others: 'read it!'
Thanks Tobias! Read Getting Real.
Today we announce a new way to share pages in Backpack. Now when you share a page you can decide which people may edit the page and which people may only view the page. This allows certain people to be responsible for editing pages while others have access to read the pages but cannot make changes. It's a very useful feature, especially for larger teams.
Here's how read-only pages work. When you click "Make a new page" you'll see a link below the people checkboxes that says "Specify who can make changes to this page."
The checkboxes are replaced by a table when you click the "Specify..." link. The people on your account appear on the left-hand column with the familiar checkboxes to give them access to the page. Then to the right of each person you can set whether they can "change the page" or "only view the page." Two links above those right-hand columns allow you to apply the same setting to all people at once. By default everyone can change the page.
In this example we want to allow David, Jason and Sarah to change the page. Everyone else will have read-only access. The settings look like this:
When David, Jason or Sarah open the page they will see the usual editing options. They can add information to the page, edit what's there, and move things around like any other page. Here's how the page looks to people who are allowed to make changes:
Everyone else on the account will see the read-only version of this page. There are no links on the top of the page to add content. Instead the header says "You can view this page but you cannot make changes." There are no links to add content, no edit links, no delete links, and no drag handles to re-order page elements. Check boxes cannot be checked or unchecked. This is what people see when they are only allowed to view the page:
Read-only pages are a very useful addition to Backpack. We hope they inspire your team with new ways to share Backpack Pages.
In addition to read-only Pages, today's update includes a refreshed design for the "All Pages" screen. The old design was a plain list of links and often half of the screen was empty space:
The new design uses two columns to better fill the page. New icons give the screen more style and interest:
We've also answered a frequent request regarding completed list items. People were frustrated by the way their lists got longer and longer as they completed more items. Eventually the page got too long, and the only option was to delete the completed items. This is a problem because many people prefer to keep their completed items for future reference or for reasons of accountability. Here's an example of a long list of completed items:
We've solved this problem by collapsing all but the last three completed items:
Click the link at the bottom of the list to reveal all the completed items:
You might also notice we added dates to the beginning of each checked item. Those dates are very useful when your team collaborates on a list and you wish to keep track of when the different tasks were completed.
We're really happy with these updates to Backpack and we hope you find them useful. Thanks for your continued support!
Check out the new Highrise marketing site, launched earlier this week:
Includes a new “Fresh News & Buzz” strip in the sidebar. Here's how we pull that off.
Evan Bartlett is a member of the business development team at Angelsoft. Lifeinlists is his digital sandbox and he recently published his Top 10 most useful webapps of 2008 there. On the list: Highrise.
Highrise
Highrise became a big-small contender in the CRM space this year by adding Deal tracking and full data export. Not to mention, no CRM comes close to making it this easy to keep track of your contacts in detail. After falling off the wagon with Salesforce (multiple times), SugarCRM, and PipelineDeals, Highrise is the only one that became critical to my day-to-day activites at work.
Thanks for the mention Evan.
Want to send out an email newsletter to your contacts in Highrise? Check out Newsberry, a service to send and track email newsletters that syncs with Highrise. "Highrise integration" [Newsberry Help section] offers more details.
With Highrise Sync enabled, Newsberry will automatically sync contacts in Highrise to subscribers in your list. All changes in your Highrise account will be visible in your Newsberry contacts list in which you enabled Highrise Sync...If you check "Enable Highrise syncing" checkbox and click the "Sync accounts" button, your contacts list will be synchronized with Highrise. If any information is updated within your Highrise account (contacts added, updated or deleted) the updates would be visible in your Newsberry list (in approximately 3 hours). After syncing, you will be redirected to a page where you can manage subscribers and you will see the Highrise contacts and regular contacts.
Highrise contacts are marked with the Highrise icon and cannot be edited. You will see a note that Highrise syncing is enabled next to the green icon.
Learn more about how Newsberry integrates with Highrise at the Newsberry help section or read the Newsberry blog post announcing the integration.
Max Guedy writes in to tell us how Getting Real has helped him create a new app:
My name's Max, I run a small design studio in Cape-Town, South-Africa. I purchased the ebook Getting Real a couple of hours ago and read it in one go, it was really inspiring and spoke mountains to me.
I've been planning a new app since august and got into many traps you mention... i have 3 partners ( a lawyer, a developer and a branding consultant ) and making decisions about small things is often what chews up our time and we are not even close to launching... at this stage, we have :
- a catchy name myows.com and myows.net
- an almost-finished logo
- the home page is 90 % complete, but we're struggling about the sign-up form.
- the copy is 60 % complere
- the wire-frame for the content pages.Its very interesting that we naturally came up with a lot of features you recommend, a forum, a blog, video-tour, free testing phase ( we also want featured users )... but reading your book has just given me the extra-Oumpf i needed and valuable tips about the launching phase, i hope to measure up to your success one day !
Thank you for this great read, probably the best thing i've done on a Friday night since i found out my girlfriend was pregnant...
Keep up the great work !
Max
Thanks for sharing Max!
The Ice-Qube Preparedness System is a collection of everything you need in case of emergency, disaster, or accident. The product line was developed by Leslie Fastenberg, a suburban 'hockey mom' from Old Westbury, NY who, while researching emergency preparedness products for her own family was inspired to develop a more comprehensive, practical and efficient kit than what was available on the market.
Leslie is a big Basecamp fan and emailed us saying, "Basecamp has enabled me to function like a big company, makes the most efficient use of my time, gives me the most information I could want to supervise and access my teams participation, serves as the ultimate back up and makes sense of my wild mind and ultimately grow my business."
We asked her to tell us more:
I am a small business owner who works with many independent contractors who are connected through me. I initially came to Basecamp when we began constructing our new website. This new site launch coincided with a great deal of new product development. since my products includes lots of other products. keeping track of the lists and keeping everyone current, could have been a job in and of itself. Basecamp made that problem, no problem!In time, I came to give myself over to the Basecamp style of working and found that their system for messages, to do's and milestone's worked perfectly - they improved my process. For a small business owner like me, basecamp is like having a solid assistant who is compulsive - and the price is right.
One final thought, now I use Basecamp to analyze performance. In addition to the fact that I can see how often my people are signing into their accounts and working on my projects, I have found that the people who are most productive are drawn to Basecamp, those who resist slow the rest of us down. Basecamp has become my Rorschach!
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
Frank Scarpaci, President of The Vianova Group (which offers corporate social responsibility consulting services), went from a Basecamp skeptic to an evangelist. He tells us why:
How do you use Basecamp and why do you like it?
We use Basecamp for all of our client projects. Basecamp is highly effective, to the point that our clients frequently thank us enough for using it! Basecamp makes potentially onerous projects simple and pleasant. It is extremely easy to learn and helps me deliver a wonderful mix of efficiency, transparency, stakeholder devotion and positive outcomes. In short, it makes my clients quite happy which make me very happy!
Why were you a Basecamp skeptic at first?
For a time, I was enticed by what appeared to be “extra” bells and whistles that some other web-based project management programs might offer. I wondered if perhaps Basecamp was “too simple”. As a seasoned project manager who had absolutely done their homework in reviewing project management software, I initially thought Basecamp was only good for really small and simple projects. Most of my projects are not small and not simple. Many times they involve large diverse teams. After testing many web-based programs I gave up in frustration. They were too complicated and my concern was I would have to spend way too much time training my clients on how to use it!
So, I figured I would give Basecamp a try. Reluctantly I set up my first project which was a large-scale fundraising event involving a large and diverse committee of staff and volunteers. Much to my surprise the entire group began using Basecamp immediately. More importantly, there are significant intangible team benefits to the “less is more” streamlined eloquence that is Basecamp. My clients frequently tell me how much they appreciate us giving them a highly effective tool that is so easy to use.
You said your team gave it rave reviews. What did they like?
Clients adore the tool for making their lives easier, creating a positive team dynamic and helping creative ideas bubble to the surface. When clients use the words “genius” and “blessing” in describing your project management software, it’s a sure thing you’ll keep on using it! Here are just a few quotes from my happy clients:
“The best part about Basecamp was that I had one-button access to everything and everyone that I needed to do my job well. It’s simplicity is its genius.”“But the thing I liked best about it was that it was a great place to keep track of all meeting happenings and the task list (assigning feature) was a great tool to help keep people on task. I like that it allowed us to record documents and limit the amount of printing and reprinting of documents. It served the purpose well and allowed us to limit the amount of face to face meetings required... It was a blessing!”
“I loved the ability to upload and share files and notify key people without having to send out a ton of e-mails. It was a great way to keep tabs on what everyone else was doing and make sure we were all reaching our milestones. Knowing that everyone else was watching, too, it motivated me to go in and check off my “to do” tasks ahead of schedule.”
