List of recommended free tools for running a small business (including Basecamp and Highrise)

"Running a Small Business – Free Tools" offers advice on tools that help with scheduling, project planning, invoicing, and everything else that goes into any other small business. (The author runs a recording studio.) Two of the tools recommended are Basecamp and Highrise:

Project Planning – Basecamp

Basecamp from 37Signals is an excellent project planning tool. I’ve tried pretty much all of them and like the way Basecamp works the best. Their web interface is fantastic, and it’s almost fully functional on the iPhone too. We use the Milestone feature to set date-specific deadlines (finish mixing by x date) and To-Dos to set unbounded goals (get new mic cables). We try to finish the To-Dos on a weekly basis. We use the Writeboard feature to brainstorm and to lay out our weekly meeting agenda, and occasionally use the Messages feature to share files or links that we don’t want to lose in emails.

Contact Management – Highrise

Highrise is 37Signals’ contact management tool, and it’s ideal for us. It’s really quick and easy to add contacts, and we have people tagged as ‘band’ and sometimes more specifically as ‘bassist’, ‘violinist’, etc. so we can quickly find someone if we need a session player. We also tag bands as ‘prospects’ so we know who to follow up with. The great thing about Highrise is that it’s free for 2 users and up to 250 contacts (you have to look carefully for this plan on the signup page, it’s in small text). We’re close to 250, but when we hit the limit we have to clean contacts out, which is a great way to keep our lists up to date. Another neat feature of Highrise is their ‘Dropbox’. When you’re emailing with someone who’s a contact, you can copy your personal dropbox email address on the message, and it’s automatically added to the contact as a note.

See the full list.

A novel idea: Use Highrise to keep track of fictional characters' lives

HOW TO: Write a Novel Using the Web offers a toolkit for using the web to write a book. Highrise is suggested as a way to track the "lives" of all your characters.

If your story is very character heavy, keeping track of all the people in your novel, who they are, and how they interact will be vital to making sure the continuity isn’t interrupted. It may seem silly to treat your fictional characters as real people, but using an online CRM application like Highrise (which offers a free account good for 250 characters), can be a great way to keep track of the people in your book. Create an entry for each character and treat them like real people, attaching notes about their interactions, histories, and characteristics as you write.

New in Highrise: Color coded categories for tasks and deals

Today we released a new feature to better organize your tasks and deals in Highrise. Now you can set a custom color for each task category or deal category. For example, you can make your 'call' tasks red, your 'followup' tasks blue, 'meetings' green, or anything you like. Color-coded categories help you organize your work and add a touch of personality to your account.

To customize your task colors, go to the "Add a task" form and click "Edit categories" beside the Category pulldown.

The Edit Categories screen now includes a customizable color swatch beside each category.

Click a color swatch to reveal the color menu.

When you click a color in the menu, the category is instantly updated with your new color.

Now when you view your tasks, you'll see the colorized label to the left of any task with that category.

You can color-code the categories for your Deals using the same process. Just click on the Deals tab and then click "Edit categories" beside the Category pulldown in the sidebar. Or click "Edit categories" when you are adding a new Deal to jump to the Edit Categories screen.

We hope you like color coding your tasks and deals in Highrise. Enjoy the new feature and thanks again for your support!

Highrise is "especially suited" to small groups of lawyers and solo firms

Opveon University is a resource that aims to help legal professionals be more efficient. The site recently published an overview of Highrise for Law Firms:

Highrise is a tool created by 37signals to help individuals and small business ingest and organize the plethora of information that we get each day through simple communication with other people. It does a superb job of organizing our client interactions. It can do the same for yours...It’s a wonderful tool, especially suited to small groups and solo firms.

Read the full piece.

New in Highrise: Quickly file a note or email under a case or deal

Today we launched a new Highrise feature that makes it a lot faster and easier to file a note or email under a case or deal. This new feature will save you clicks and time — especially when filing a lot of notes/emails one after another. We think you're really going to love it. Thanks again for using Highrise!

Here's a quick video showing you how it works.

TeamSupport integrates with Highrise

TeamSupport is an app that "integrates Customer Support, Product Development, Product Management and Quality Assurance so you can offer outstanding support to your customers." It now offers native integration with Highrise so that company and contact information can by synced from Highrise to TeamSupport, and ticket information can be sent back to Highrise.

Learn more about how to set it up and see a video of the integration in action. (Note: The integration currently only works with Highrise accounts that support SSL. Basic and Free accounts do not currently support SSL and do not currently work with TeamSupport.)

Tags API available for Highrise

Attention developers: Check out the tags API for Highrise.

The tags API allows you to add, update, and delete tags from parties (people and companies), cases, and deals. In the documentation below, the generic "#{subject_type}" text must be replaced in practice with either "people", "companies", "kases", or "deals", and "#{subject_id}" should be the id of the subject (person, company, case or deal) that you want to manipulate or query the tags for.

Related:
Highrise tags help you drill down to specific contacts [Product Blog]
New in Highrise: Improved tags list [Product Blog]

Import Your Highrise companies and deals into Pulse

Pulse is a web-based cash flow management tool that just added the ability to import Highrise companies and deals.

From the Pulse Companies tab, you will now find an import section in the sidebar:

You have long been able to import your Basecamp companies and projects, and now you can import your Highrise companies. In addition to companies, we’ve also added the ability to import your Highrise Deals into Pulse as projects.

Learn more.

New in Highrise: Improved contact editing

We've just improved editing and adding contacts in Highrise. The new edit contact screen is shorter, less cluttered, and better organized. It lets you focus on only the pieces of information that are important for each contact without cluttering the screen with empty text fields. Here's a look at the new, improved edit contact screen:

Pro tip: Try using the "tab" key to quickly move from field to field as you enter contact information. It's quicker than using the mouse and keeps your hands on the keyboard. Try it now by adding a new contact to your Highrise account or editing an existing contact.

Highrise is a great place to keep your contact list current and centralized for you and your team. We think this improvement makes updating those contacts easier and faster than ever. We hope you enjoy it. Thanks for using Highrise!

UPDATE: Go behind the scenes and check out all the design decisions that led to the final design. Includes videos and screenshots.

Create new Highrise contacts from your web form with S2 Form Processor

Want to collect data from a form at your own website and have it automatically generate a contact at Highrise? S2 Form Processor: For Highrise is "an elegant and easy to use form processer that captures your website form data and inputs into your Highrise account." It costs $39. Features include:

• Automatically creates a new Highrise® Contact from your web form


• Tagged form fields like name, phone and email are matched to the new Highrise® contact


• Creates a new note for the contact with other form data


• Customizable CAPTCHA challenge system to prevent spam


• Sends form submission alert with copy of form data to up to three recipients


• Optional and customizable thank-you message can be sent to form submitter


• Can use virtually any POP/IMAP e-mail account for sending e-mails

Learn more.