FactoryCity

With narry a word on the 37 Signals’ blog SvN, the veil has been lifted on their long awaited CRM tool called Highrise.

There are a number of posts that capture some of the many features of Highrise on the SvN blog and are worth a look:

• Preview 1: An introduction to Highrise (the product previously known as Sunrise)
• Preview 2: Highrise permissions and groups
• Preview 3: Highrise welcome and workspace tabs
• Preview 4: Adding people to Highrise and dealing with duplicates
• Preview 5: Highrise tasks
• Preview 6: Highrise people, companies, and the dashboard
• Preview 7: Highrise plays well with email
• Preview 8: Highrise Cases

In the meantime, I’ve collected a bunch of screenshots (nice catch Allen) — in addition to their great tour — that will give you a sense of what the app is all about.

I’m totally excited about their adoption of OpenID, but I have to admit, their implementation — especially in the forum — is a little odd. I love the auto-adapting interface for inputing your OpenID, but the fact that I can’t sign in to the forum with the OpenID that I created my Highrise account with kind of misses the point.

And still no sign of microformats either, but a guy can hope right?

Anyway, it is exciting to take a look at all the interface greatness in this app — definitely some fine work. Whether I’ll become a paying customer is up in the air, especially as open source solutions like CiviCRM exist (though without the interface trappings that make 37 Signals products so attractive). I do like what I see so far, though — and if I can find a way to fit it into my workflow, I’ll likely end up a pretty satisfied user.