Ten Minutes With Highrise March 20, 2007

Intro: Highrise is another product from 37Signals, who make project-organizing, collaborative websites like Basecamp, Campfire and Backpack. Highrise focuses on organizing your contacts in a more imaginative way than an address book: “Highrise is your homebase for everyone that’s important to your business. It puts together all those little points of contact so you can see the bigger picture. It makes one history out of many interactions. Highrise helps you make sense of it all.”

Exec Sum: Quick to figure out, useful if you’re having problems keeping tabs on the people your company is dealing with. Not, though, if you don’t like paying for stuff, or hate entering data.

My tenminut.es: Having used 37Signals stuff before it all looked familiar, perhaps too much so. At first I thought it looked too much like their other services to be, well, different. But it doesn’t take long to figure out the distinguishing marks: Basecamp builds itself around projects and collaboration; Campfire is group-oriented chat. Backpack is a dumping ground for stuff. Highrise is a group database of who your business is dealng with. It’s built around “cases” – closing a sale, getting a jaded and elusive journalist to write about your product, etc.

To make it work, of course, you have to add your data. It’s easy enough, with all the AJAXy niceness you’d expect, but it could be easier. There are separate fields, for example for first and second names. That’s one extra step I don’t want to make if I’m dragging or copying from somewhere else. I could upload a vCard instead, but if I can do that, why not let me import my whole address book, or at least select from a list?

Once you’ve entered a few key contacts you can add notes, tasks and other information about them and about your dealings with them. Great if more than one of you is dealing with them. You can group these notes around “cases” as well as people; so, say, you’re trying to woo a WSJ columnist you can build a case called “WSJ wooing” and have colleagues involved in the wooing share their information (including emails) on one page. I couldn’t test this because the free version doesn’t allow you to add cases (prices go from $12 a month to $150 a month.)

Verdict: As usual a quality product from 37Signals that is intuitive and well-thought out. I’d like to see more generous features in the free version, and less legwork to get it up and keep it running.

Score: 7 out of 10

Update March 23: Impressively, 37Signals have listened to feedback and changed some of their plans. The free option now includes 1 case open at any one time, and increased the number of contacts from 25 to 250. More details here. I’d still like to see easier uploading of contacts, and of course synchronizing with other programs and devices. But this is a good start.