37signals Launches Highrise CRM, Big Deal?

Venerable Enterprise 2.0 software vendor 37signals — makers of Basecamp, Backpack, Writeboards, and the Ruby on Rails framework — has just opened the front door for their much anticipated CRM'ish offering. Highrise marks a new era of simple CRM for the 2.0 generation, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on a sneak preview.

Th idea behind Highrise, as with all of 37signal's hosted applications, it to simplify an application down to its core functionality in order to religiously refine and streamline the most useful features.

In this case, the application is an “online contact manager that helps you keep track of who you talk to, what was said, and what to do next…you can set reminders for follow-ups, thank you notes, calls tasks, and more.” Now while a simplistic start, to us it sounds a lot like the foundation of a Customer Resource Management (CRM) application.

But it isn't, well not in the traditional sense. Salesforce.com does these things and adds about 1000 other features that you might also need, but that also might tend to complicate. Highrise is positioned between the traditional CRM, your address book, your todo list, and your calendar.

Features of Highrise

Smooth Usability Sailing
Highrise has a very Basecamp-like look and feel, so users of other 37signals applications should have no problem traversing from the Enterprise 2.0 backwoods to the concrete and steel of Highrise. When you log in, you are greeted with the traditional dashboard page with latest activity, search field, and tasks arranged by due date. As you'd expect, the layout is smooth and simple.

At the top are the tabs for different sections. Dashboard, Contacts, Tasks, and Cases.

Dashboard, Contacts, Tasks
These areas of the product are unsurprising. The names fairly well tell the tale, and in fact, we've seen these characters all before — albeit perhaps in slightly different packaging — in other 37signals applications.

The extension of note here is in the Contacts area. With Highrise, contacts can have what's called a Dropbox. This is an email endpoint that can be used to automatically generate Tasks or Contacts for this user. More on this below.

Cases, A Clean, Well-lighted View
Cases are what differentiate this product. Cases tie all of your information together in a new and productive way. Its similar to an event or project in Basecamp in that it ties all of the small stuff together in a way that's natural to the needs and operations at hand. On one page, listed is the title of the event, a place to add notes, the people involved and their input and categorization tools at the right.

A huge downside here is that — much like Basecamp and Time Tracking — you don't get the Cases feature unless you are willing to shell out at least US$ 50/month for the fully featured version of the software.

We think the otherwise inspiring 37signals have mis-stepped here. With Basecamp and Time Tracking, you can see the connection between billing for cash and having to pay more for the feature. But here, with Highrise, Cases are really the one feature that is unique. Yes, there are some organization and packaging differences around Contacts and Tasks, but that's about it.

37signals Launches Highrise CRM, Big Deal?

Venerable Enterprise 2.0 software vendor 37signals -- makers of Basecamp, Backpack, Writeboards, and the Ruby on Rails framework -- has just opened the front door for their much anticipated CRM'ish offering. Highrise marks a new era of simple CRM for the 2.0 generation, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on a sneak preview.

Are you hiring?    Post your job today ($45 for 45 days)!