Total Attorneys can't live without Basecamp!

Inc.com interviewed Ed Scanlan, the founder and CEO of Total Attorneys, about some of the tools they can't live without. They had some great things to say about Basecamp. Thanks guys!

[Case Study] Diabetes Hands Foundation: "Basecamp dramatically improves our internal communications"

Manny Hernandez is the President of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, a nonprofit that runs two social networks for people touched by diabetes, TuDiabetes.com (in English) and EsTuDiabetes.com (in Spanish), with well over 5,000 members from all over the world. He wrote to tell us about how his team uses Basecamp.

We work to raise diabetes awareness through a number of projects, such as Word In Your Hand, Drawing Diabetes and Diabetes Supplies Art.

Our main operation is in California, where our full time employees (2) work. However, the directors of our board are spread between California, Arizona (1), Florida (1) and Venezuela (1). We also have a board of advisors, most of whom are located elsewhere in California (5) as well in the Boston area (2). We also have volunteers and partners working from Texas (2), the East Coast (2), California (1), Mexico (1), Venezuela (1), Argentina (1) and Saudi Arabia (1). In total, we have up to 16 people using Basecamp at any given point.

(Pictured at left: Manny Hernandez, President of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, along with Andreina Davila, Creative Director.)

I first heard about Basecamp in late 2006, while I worked in Full Sail University. After I started using it, I couldn’t think of any other way to manage project/product communications.

Since I knew about the product prior to the start of our operation as a nonprofit foundation, I made sure that it became the way to manage projects and remote communications from the beginning. This made it easier for all those involved to stay on top of the critical information. I wanted to avoid at all costs having people in the team being left out, which I had seen happen so many times when email was the way to “manage” communications.

We recently upgraded to the Plus Plan, since we ran out of projects to manage through the Basic Plan. Our projects fall into four categories (the “companies” that we have set up): Diabetes Hands Foundation, which contains the projects that only involve the board of directors; Advisory Board, which are meant for our advisors; Freelancers and Volunteers, where we list the projects that involve the participation of volunteers or contractors; and Partners, where we manage the projects that we work on with partner organizations. This way we can easily separate communications that are only meant for one specific group.

New in Backpack: Bookmark tags in your sidebar

We've been working hard to make it easier to organize and access your Backpack pages. Earlier this month we released reorderable sidebar links. Today we're announcing another feature for your sidebar. Now you can add tags to your sidebar too.

Tags are like keywords you can use to label a page. If you have some pages that relate to "sales," you can add a "sales" tag to each page. Then you can click "sales" on your "All Pages" screen to quickly see all pages that have been labeled "sales." Basically tags are a simple and powerful way to group your pages together so you can easily find them later. Tags have been available in Backpack for a long time. What's new today is that you can bookmark your favorite tags in your sidebar so you can easily jump to tagged pages.

Here's how it works. First make sure you have some pages tagged. You can tag a page by clicking the "Tag" link on the top of any of your pages:

After you have tagged some pages, you can click the "All Pages" link in the sidebar to see a list of all your tags. The "All Pages" screen has a list of your tags on the right side:

Click on one of the tags on the right to see the pages for that tag.

This tag screen has a new link on the bottom. You can click "Add the 'Development' tag to my sidebar" and the tag will be bookmarked in your sidebar along with your favorite pages. Whenever you click the bookmark in the sidebar, it will take you to this tag screen so you can jump to a related page. You can also reorder the tags and mix them up with your list of pages. Just hover over a tag with your mouse and you'll see the icon on the right side to drag the bookmark up and down.

This update should make it easier for you to group pages and quickly access them. For those of you with a ton of pages, it can also help reduce clutter in your sidebar. We're excited to see all the creative ways our customers use this feature. Thanks for your continued support. We hope you like this new addition to Backpack!

New in Backpack: Post comments on list items and notes

We're very excited to announce a new Backpack feature. Now you can post comments and add attachments to list items and notes on your Backpack pages. Every list item or note can be a starting point for a discussion.

To comment on an item, hover over it with your mouse. You'll see a comment icon appear on the right side:

Click the comment icon to see the comment page for that list item. You can check and uncheck the item at the top of the page. Use the comment form to post your thoughts or attach files:

After one or more comments are posted to an item, an icon will appear beside the item with the number of comments inside it:

This is an incredibly useful feature that turns every page into an opportunity for discussion and clarification. We hope you enjoy posting comments to list items and notes. Thanks for organizing your life and business with Backpack!

Backpack max plan now fits 500 users

On popular demand, we've raised the user limit on the max plan for Backpack to 500 users. This is a five-fold increase from the previous limit of 100. Now Backpack should fit even more companies and accommodate the needs of all the customers we have that were nudging up against the previous limit.

This is a free upgrade for everyone on the existing max plan and we will not be raising the price of the plan either. Enjoy!

New in Backpack: Reorderable sidebar links

We're excited to announce a new Backpack feature. Now you can reorder the pages linked in your sidebar. Sidebar links are no longer limited to alphabetical order. Our customers have been asking for this and we're glad to deliver it today.

In the past, people have been using all kinds of tricks to keep their pages in a certain order. We've seen people numbering their pages or prepending them with funny symbols like * and # to force the pages to the top of the sidebar. Now all you have to do is hover over a page and drag to move it up or down.

Hover over a page link and you'll see the drag icon on the right-hand side. Grab onto the icon and drag up and down to reorder the page. When you drop the page, the position is saved. It's that easy.

We hope you enjoy taking control of your sidebar with this improvement to Backpack. Thanks for your continued support!

1/13: Jason Fried demos 37signals products at Chicago Apple Store

Join Jason Fried, founder of 37signals, as he demos Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack at the Apple Store at 679 North Michigan Ave. in Chicago. January 13 at 7pm.

"A guide to personal productivity" that uses Backpack to stay organized

Russell Quinn's "A guide to personal productivity" details how he uses Backpack to stay organized.

Backpack - This is the cornerstone of everything. A super simple, web-based organisation tool that is so flexible it can accommodate almost any work flow you can think of. Although it has recently grown into a group-based, ‘intranet’ system, it still scales-down to support the lone user.

My tasks are essentially organised into a series of to-do lists that are in turn grouped into a number of pages. My page setup looks like this:

• 0. Dropbox - This is my task inbox. Anything that I have on my mind initially ends up in here, whether it’s a quick admin chore, an idea for a new project, or a life goal - the dropbox gets everything out of my head and stored safely into my system. Backpack even supports emailing text and files directly into this page. It also contains my today/urgent list (more on that later).
• 1. Tasks - General to-dos and things that have a definite goal are grouped together here: ‘buy X a birthday present’, ‘pay electricity bill’ and ‘pump up bicycle tyres’ are all examples of short, succinct tasks. Within this page I have five lists titled General, People, Administration, Finances and Technology, which is what I can categorise most of my tasks into. I often make location-based task lists too. These are groups of tasks that I need to do the next time I’m at at a certain place, like the post office or train station.
• 2. Projects - As I’ve already mentioned, all of my company/team-related projects are in another system entirely. This page is for my solo, non-client projects. The definition of a project, as opposed to a task, is something that has a long term, abstract goal with an ongoing series of tasks to reach it. Examples of projects are Writing, Creative, Learning German and Chess Club. Each project has its own list on the page and always contains the next atomic tasks I need to complete in order to move that project forward.
• 3. Waiting For - A record of everything that I’m waiting for other people to complete. This page is grouped up into Orders (goods that I’ve purchased online and am waiting to arrive in the mail), Administration (usually questions about some legal or taxation issue) and Financial (people who owe me money :)
• 4. To Buy - A simple list of things that I need to buy, grouped by the general locations where I can get them from.
• 5. Someday - This is the daydreaming list. ‘Write a film’, ‘fly to the stars’ and ’save the whale’ are all things I (maybe) want to do at some point in my life, but there’s no way of breaking them down into concrete, atomic tasks at the moment, so they end up here where they’re safe and organised.
• @PAGES - I have a lot of information pages where I just group together thoughts and supporting documents about things I’m working on. I prefix all of these with @’s.
• §PAGES - Finally, I lied slightly about this being a totally personal system. My girlfriend Lucy and I share some pages and these are prefixed with §’s. The examples above are to store films we’d both like to see and who last did the grocery shopping.

The final type of task is the recurring task. These are the things that come around on a regular basis, like visiting the dentist, paying taxes or watering the plants. Backpack supports these too with its ‘reminders’ feature. Simply add the task to receive an email (and optionally an SMS) at the defined interval. Reminders are also great for single items that have a specific deadline - this really helps to keep tasks out of your calendar.

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

Large company uses Basecamp to "feel" like a small company

Furqan Nazeeri writes that Basecamp has "crossed the chasm" from startups to large companies:

I'm a huge fan of Basecamp. For the few people who haven't heard of Basecamp, it's a team collaboration and project management tool. Adoption amongst startups is high, but it has crossed the chasm and large companies are now adopting it with gusto. I was in a meeting a couple weeks ago with some senior guys from a large (read billion dollar) offshoring/BPO company where they were pitching me for some business. They spent 10 minutes of an hour-long meeting raving about Basecamp and how it made them "feel" like a small company. They knew their competition for the deal was a group of smaller companies and part of their argument as to "why them" was Basecamp! You know you have a killer product when people start ascribing emotions to it.

Do you work at a large company that uses Basecamp or another 37signals product? Let us know.

A Campfire to Jabber interface

Attention developers: There's a newly released Campfire to Jabber interface. This is a simple script that will forward messages from a Campfire room to a Jabber account, and vice versa. (Jabber is an open instant messaging technology that anyone can use.) It uses Tinder, the unofficial Campfire API, and xmpp4r-simple, a Jabber client library. You can run it on your own server or local machine.