A "Virtual Office Kinda Life" with 37signals tools

The author of Setting Contexts has published a couple of posts about using 37signals products:

How Backpack is Saving My Sanity talks about using the entire suite of 37signals tools:

For the first time in a few months I feel like I’m more in control - not just organized, but working with my teams more efficiently. And my teams have been very supportive in trying these tools out and participating. While I don’t have the ability to block off time each day to get work done (too many meetings - grrr) without interruption, I can track what needs to be done and get things done before and after the “workday”.

Living a Virtual Office Kinda Life talks about the web-based tools the author uses at work to stay organized and keep in touch. Among the list:

Basecamp - we use it for project management and have just started to share with our clients. It took a full day to reorganize the existing account when I started - I also put together a couple of screencasts for our team to learn how to use it. I’m also planning to do a couple for our clients so that they feel comfortable using it.

Backpack - we use this as our own intranet. Anything internal (not project-based) goes here. This has been really successful in terms of adoption - everyone has been adding to pages as well as adding their own.

Highrise - we’re using this for our CRM solution and to track our new business process. As of right now, only the crayonistas involved with new business have access.

Read the rest of Living a Virtual Office Kinda Life to see the other tools listed (Twitter, iPhones, etc.).

How Beanstalk uses Campfire when things go wrong

The team behind Beanstalk, a hosted Subversion system, discusses using Campfire when things go wrong.

We just had a short outage on Beanstalk, which required a quick reboot on our slices at Engine Yard. While this situation really sucks, it happens. The best thing you can do is let people know you’re working on it and update them on the progress. By using Campfire, we’re able to give people an extra sense of comfort that real people are hard at work on the problem. In the end, a negative thing becomes a positive experience.

Customer love for Beanstalk's support efforts in Campfire:

Versatility Skateboards: "Basecamp is the body of our business’s communications and Campfire is our brain"

Billy Putrino of Versatility Skateboards on his team's use of Basecamp and Campfire:

How do you use our products and why do you like them?
Versatility Skateboards is a new skateboard company founded in early 2008. Our company is headed up by three partners and our steadily expanding skate team has seven riders. When we’re not out skating, we virtually work from home. Basecamp and Campfire has enabled us to remain 100% connected with each other.

Basecamp is the body of our business’s communications. Every project, from designing a new skateboard to planning a contest sponsorship, is tracked in Basecamp.

Campfire is our brain. All three of us leave it up and running all day, which allows us the ability to brainstorm at the drop of a hat. The best feature of Campfire is that it’s logged and we can revisit the ideas we discussed 10 minutes, 10 days or 10 weeks later. Without Campfire, a lot of ideas would be lost!

Which features do you use most?
We use Basecamp’s files feature the most. It lets us share board designs, skate pictures, website art and even skate videos; the files feature creates a central location for all these files. It’s so much easier than emailing multiple copies of these files back and forth to each other.

37signals products are "essential web tools for virtual students"

Three 37signals tools made the list at Ditch the backpack: 100 essential web tools for virtual students. Here's what the list is all about:

While learning at home offers great opportunities for working on your own time and schedule, it can also offer drawbacks when it comes to working with others or getting immediate help on a problem. Whether you need help, collaboration, or just want a little extra knowledge when completing your assignments, these web tools will help you find what you need. From note taking to researching to staying organized, the following resources will have you making top grades in your classes.

And here are the 37signals tools that made the cut:

Campfire. Set up instant chat rooms with your study group or classroom using Campfire and make communicating as a group much easier.

Writeboard. Create a web-based text document with this tool, then use it to either edit, share, or send yourself a text file of your document.

Backpack. This tool can organize anything from just your own studies to that of an entire class. Make pages, use calendars, post announcements, get email or text message reminders, and more.

See the full list.

Backpack Tip: Jump to a specific date/month

How to jump to a specific date/month in the Backpack calendar:

Propane takes Campfire's immediacy and "turns it up to eleven"

Trevor Squires on why he wrote Propane (coming soon) for Campfire: "Campfire is about immediacy. When you want to share a file, you just upload it. Seen a cool image? Copy in the url and Campfire shows it inline. With Propane I'm trying to take immediacy and turn it up to eleven. In a desktop app I can do stuff that a web app can't do."

When you drag an image from Safari and drop it into Propane, what are you trying to communicate? Sure, Campfire displays the image, but where did it come from? How many times have you been asked "where's that from?". Propane does that for you.



Same thing with text from a web page.

When you copy in a tweet url, why are you doing that? If you want to share the tweet, the actual message is what you meant to share - not some opaque URL. Propane turns it into a twicture because that's what's recognized as a great way to share tweet messages.



How many clicks does it take to upload a file? 3? This is supposed to be immediacy. Just drop the file on Propane.

Stay tuned for more info.

Campfire video tip: Name shortcut

37signals' Jamis Buck shows a quick shortcut you can use to call out individual names in Campfire.

See your team's Twitter posts inside Campfire

Des Traynor works with Contrast, a web application development company. The team is geographically split (3 in Dublin, 1 in Northern Ireland), so they use Campfire for day to day chatting in order to "recreate the office atmosphere."

Recently they've begun including their twitter feeds in Campfire too. Des says, "This is really helpful as often a tweet by one of us will start a Campfire discussion, and conversely sometimes one of us will tweet the outcome of a Campfire chat."

At Contrast, we use Campfire extensively every day to keep in touch, share links, make plans and discuss projects. We also love Twitter, and often use it to have small public conversations viewable by anyone and everyone, but also to share ideas that often originate from discussions that we’ve had in Campfire.

Last week, Des suggested that it would be great if we could see things that team members were posting on Twitter from inside Campfire. I got the rationale straight away: I often have Campfire open all day, but turn off Twitter, which is often distracting while working on something else. It’s useful and fun to see what the other guys are talking about.

Twitter2Campfire

Anyway, I liked the idea and decided to do something about it. I was able to quickly create a feed on Twitter search that pulls in all tweets from @eoghanmccabe, @paulca, @davidjrice or @destraynor. A small script now runs every minute and pulls in the feed and posts new updates to Campfire. Now we can keep a track of the conversations we’re having outside Campfire, inside Campfire.

I’ve published the source code to the script on GitHub if you’d like to play with it yourself.

How 37signals uses Campfire

Campfire is where our team — local and remote — gathers everyday. We use it to chat, show each other screenshots, get feedback, upload files, collaborate on copy, share code, get alerts when sites are modified, search previous conversations, and much more.

It does so many disparate things that it's sometimes tough for us to explain its power. People get it but they don't always really get it. The screenshots and video tour at the Campfire site are a good start. But there's so much more.

A few months back, we posted a series of entries at Signal vs. Noise about 37signals' usage of Campfire to show 1) how we work and 2) all the little things that we get done in Campfire every day. All screenshots from the series are from real usage and were taken during a single week. It will give you lots of ideas on how you can use the group chat tool and you'll see why we couldn't live without it.

Behind the Scenes at 37signals posts:
Design
Coding
Sysadmin and development
Copywriting
Support
Miscellaneous
Postscript

And here's a sample of what you'll find in these posts:

Ryan commits a change. Then he uploads a revised screen and explains what’s different.

Neat Campfire tricks: Graph your usage and autocomplete names

Dusty Davidson from BrightMix writes in about some creative Campfire tricks:

Absolutely love Campfire, almost to a fault though! I run a web development company, BrightMix, and we hired a bunch of interns for the summer to help us launch a web app. Obviously everyone uses Campfire, but its been funny watching the usage go up, from when we were just a 2 person shop, to a 7 person shop.

One of our interns took some initiative and wrote a spider to go back through and parse the history, and GRAPH our usage!

Anyway... dumb, but kinda fun. Thought you might enjoy.

The Brightmix campfire usage graph (larger version).

You can download the spider from BrightMix too.

Autocomplete function
That post also mentions the nifty little name autocomplete function that Campfire offers. Hit the @ key and the first letter of someone's name and it will fill in their entire name:

Probably my favorite, undocumented feature, of Campfire is using the @ in chat to auto-complete someones name. It is something I have found myself using in other chats besides Campfire, just to find that it does not complete their name for me!

Note: If more than one person in the room have names that start with the same letter, just keep typing. For example, if a room has Jason and Jennifer in it, type "@jas" and Campfire will fill in Jason (the popup will show you what will appear). Or you can use initials, like "@JB" for Jamis Buck.