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.
Factory Joe 
Interesting… and I saw by the comments that some were whining about SugarCRM which is a powerful, and free competitor that can be customised.
That said, good UE goes deep.
Great article, we use Highrise all the time.
I just wanted to let you know that we just launched an Android app to use with Highrise. Its called Rooftop and is fully featured so you can manage all contacts, cases, deals, tasks etc.
You can find more info here: http://staircase3.com/rooftop or just search for ‘rooftop’ in the android market.
Thanks