Powerful contact management with Highrise [Hack Your Day]
Highrise, by 37signals, is a very powerful contact management system that lets you keep track of anything contact related. You can use it for customer care, networking, team management, even task management if you want to.
Basics
At its core, Highrise is a place to store contact information and interaction. You can create contacts, enter various contact information and you will see a list of these contacts. Nothing really special there. Once you’ve created someone, you can add a an entry to his history, anything you did together, or agreed upon for example. This entry will be saved and once you’ve been using the app for a while you will have a neat log of events that took place with different people. All searchable, with different views as expected from a quality application.
This alone gives you a lot of power and flexibility in your organization, but what really boosts your productivity is the ability to add tasks, follow-ups and dates to remember. You assign tasks contact specifically, but you can also see them aggregated and you will also get email notifications if you so choose. The reason this is so awesome is that it allows you to separate the log from the to do list. This way you can keep a tab on what is actually happening and separate it from what you want to happen and once a task is complete, it will be placed into the log as an entry about a completed task.
Features
You can find millions of ways to use Highrise, and little details to love, here are some of my favorites. When you view all your contacts, separate groups get created for companies, showing the amount of contacts inside. This is great, since there is no need to create folders for this.
Titles and companies are also shown below each contact and they are all clickable, so under my name if you see “owner of Hack Your Day”, you can click owner to see all your contacts with that job position and Hack Your Day to see everyone working at Hack Your Day.
Searching works extremely well because it seems to be an AJAX based type-as-you-search box, which means that results get filtered as you type along. Apart from speed, this also helps you refine your search and while doing that, it also looks really smooth.
You can import and export contacts into and from the most common formats. Importing can be done from vCard, Basecamp, Outlook, ACT! and export is available to vCard and Excel files. This is a great backup option, or a starting out option for those who want to switch to Highrise.
Free vs Paid
The free option for Highrise gives you 250 contacts, 1 case, 2 users but lacks SSL and file uploads. Cases are basically folders to group people in. They are great because they allow you to cross-connect people in different ways. Two of my contacts primarily work elsewhere, but we also share a project, so creating a case will let me see both of them in the same context. Overall the free plan is fine for light users, but if you need some serious space for contacts you should consider the other options.
The paid plans are quite well though out, the best option if you aren’t working in a team is the Solo plan. For just $29 a month, you get 20,000 contacts, SSL, unlimited cases, 1 GB of file storage but only one user. This is the option I will be switching to soon.
Other plans are geared toward teams, with 15, 40 and unlimited users, 3, 10 and 50GB storage (that last one’s pretty impressive), and 20, 30 and 50 thousand contacts respectively. The top of the line will put you back $149 a month, although if you have these needs, I don’t think this is a huge price to pay, I would dish it out happily for this app.
Overview
I am using Highrise regularly now to keep track of everyone and it is working really well, and I’m still in the free version. I love the ease of use (just type an entry), the searchability and the way it sneaks some productivity into my contact management, something I’ve been looking for for a while now. In the end though, you need to use it regularly for it to work. If you do though, you will become a happy camper indeed.
Original post here: Daniel
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