Review: Highrise, part 2
15 comments Latest by Roy Griffith Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:45:35 GMT
It’s been five days since I posted my initial review of Highrise, that shiny new application by our friends at 37signals. I’ve been getting adjusted to my new process of managing contacts and have had to remind myself a few times that there is a brand new tool that aims to make my life a little easier.
Contact Form Integration
I haven’t heard about a Highrise API available yet, but I will definitely be looking into tighter integration once that is available.
Direct Submissions (not yet)
It seems that Highrise isn’t going to allow direct emails to be sent to it, they need to come from an existing contact in your account. For example, our contact form sends an email to our customer service mailing list. At one point, we had it connected to the Basecamp API to submit each new contact request as a new message in a designated project, but it didn’t really give me what I was looking for. Since each user in Highrise has a custom dropbox email address, I thought that I would try to link up the contact form to submit directly to Highrise.
I got the following response back from Highrise. ;-)
Hi Robby- An email was sent to your Highrise dropbox from john@cusackforpresident.com. This address does not correspond to any address that you have recorded for yourself in your Highrise account, and so the email was discarded.
So, in the meantime, I’m following this process with new contact requests as well as the other people at PA who are responsible for responding to Contact Requests.
Contact Request Submission
So… let’s say that John Cusack (one of my favorite actors while growing up) is having a weird dream and wants to get a website built for the record store that he ran in High Fidelity.
He fills out the form and submits it, which our application than stores and also sends over his contact information to our customer service email address.
A few minutes later…
Manually Review in Mail.app (and apply 2-minute rule)
Here I am in Mail.app and doing a double-take… “is that the real John Cusack?” (no, it’s just test data).
I then ask myself the following questions…
- Can I answer this in less than 2 minutes?
- If yes, respond immediately (forward to Highrise, if contact info will be needed again)
- If no, forward to Highrise
Okay, so I’ve decided to forward this contact to Highrise as I decided to go ahead and speak with John over the phone, since he was kind enough to leave his phone number.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m using Act-On for forwarding emails to Highrise.
(back-tic h)
...and off the email goes.
View/Edit message/contact in Highrise
I’m now logged into Highrise and looking at my dashboard. As you can see, John Cusack is now at the top of my dashboad and waiting for me to decide if I want to do something with it.
Schedule Follow Up tasks
As I mentioned, I spoke with John over the phone and promised him that I’d send him a follow up email with a proposed date/time for a meeting next week.
...and that’s one way that I’m now using Highrise to getting all my contacts organized.
Five Day Review
Well, after five days of using Highrise, I’m still impressed with it. Our Administrative Assistant began using it last Friday and is using it to schedule follow up tasks for me. This definitely beats the old process of leaving post-it notes on my desk with names and phone numbers. :-)
We also upgraded to a paying account and paid for invoice #4.... and I plan to hit contact #200 later today within our account.
A few bugs:
- Forwarding email from Thunderbird doesn’t currently work (as of last Friday)
- A few forwarded emails from Mail.app didn’t work right (garbled… html emails perhaps?)
Also… it appears that 37signals has opened the doors to the public earlier today.
Have fun!
Enjoying the content? Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed.
You misinterpret the response email from highrise on direct submission.
its says someone from john@cusa…com sent email to your dropbox address and that email address doesn’t belong to dropbox owner. so email discarded. if you forward email to dropbox from your email account it works. at least for me. ;-)
You obviously have a biased opinion toward 37 Signals; with that said, what compelling reasons would you recommend for using this software?
Is it worth the money? Does it provide any competitive advantage over using the numerous solutions that provide the same functionality?
I do believe the cases module is an excellent tool, but otherwise it seems to me that this tool is redundant and provides nothing additional for a company of significant size.
What are your thoughts?
Sorry for the multiple submissions, but your website lags a bit when posting comments.
I’m not sure that I’d agree with that completely. Of all their products, I only use Basecamp and Writeboard (...and Highrise now). I like this tool because it provides my company (small business with ~10 employees) the ability to manage our company contacts together. I don’t understand where redundancy comes into as we haven’t had a good tool for managing contacts and keeping tasks related to those contacts in a group environment.
It’s all about transparency and this tool provides my team a lot of that now.
I guess my biggest reaction to this application is my annoyance that it isn’t an extension of Basecamp. I manage a small development team and we’ve been using Basecamp for nearly 8 months. That application has so much potential, so much room to grow and so much I need it to grow in order to keep pace with our growing business.
And yet here I find a product that would be ideal for our new sales team, yet it isn’t integrated into Basecamp. My message to 37 Signals is – focus on Basecamp! Give me a reason to use you next year when we have triple the employees and triple the software needs.
It doesn’t make sense to me. On the web (2.0) the mantra is integration, and yet here we have a single company releases compartmentalized applications that are an ideal extension of one another.
You obviously have a biased opinion toward 37 Signals; with that said, what compelling reasons would you recommend for using this software?
You misinterpret the response email from highrise on direct submission.
Try rssnewsdigest.com, a new comprehensive news aggregator. With rssnewsdigest, you don ’t really have to go anywhere else. http://rssnewsdigest.com
I think this is really a nice tool for allowing small companies in managing their contacts together. Something definitely needed for small companies. Since I have my own small company, I can see the benefits straight away. I would have to give it some thought, though, as I do use another product which has been working very well (and, Google offers some really wonderful ways of doing it) but there may be advantages here that I just don’t see right now.
I like almost all the work from 37 signals, i did discuss using highrise at work but atm we still continue using our old CRM which i think is just bloated with stuff that I don’t need. Thanks for sharing! - Advocaat
Come to think about it, I will discuss it again as they improved much since the time i put it under their attention. Anybody has any experience implementing this in their corporate workflow?
In regards to the contact form integration, just got my PHP form to work. You need to trick Highrise into thinking it’s getting a forward from your email address.
- I added a second set of variables to customize the message being sent to Highrise, and to change the ‘from’ address to be the email address corresponding to the dropbox address. - Have the form send a second email using these new variables to your dropbox address using “Fwd: ...” as the subject (this is the key), and with your own email as the from as stated above.
Highrise will receive the email thinking it was forwarded from you, and as long as you have a proper “From: Name email@email.com>” in the message body somewhere, it should add the person just fine.
I’m not entirely sure how to include details like “Company” and “Phone Number”, assuming these were part of the original form fields. Guess this is where the API comes in.
P.S. We use Highrise, Basecamp and Backpack religiously in our company.
Beste Advocaat Amsterdam,
Ik zag net je bericht over Highrise en CRM. Wij ontwikkelen op maat gemaakte CRM systemen, voor grote en kleine bedrijven, zonder allerlei functies die je toch niet gebruikt. Wij hebben hier veel ervaring en succes mee. Ik zou graag met je in contact komen om eens te laten zien wat wij ontwikkelen. Op je website zag ik geen contactgegevens staan, dus ik hoop dat je dit bericht ziet.
Mijn e-mail adres is: bert@safecoms.com
Met vriendelijke groet,
Bert Veerman
My company uses Basecamp as well. And I have to agree with Will that this has the best potential for getting me and my collegues through the initial startup fase without having to implement so and so automorph application. It can only bring more problems in the end.
John Limak Lara
How does one assign the account or contact to particular sales person in Highrise?