37Signals’s HighRise is a new web service for contact management. But plain contact management would be hardly worth to mention if it weren’t for the innovative approach that Highrise brings to the market. Or so the company claims.
We signed up for a free account to test. There were lots of things that we liked and others that we didn’t, or wished for.
Let’s take them from the beginning.
Highrise offers a solution for contact management that is intuitive. Contacts are more than mere names and addresses. They are the people we work, communicate and collaborate with, for business or personal reasons. Contact management is therefore more than managing a contact’s details. It is Contact Relationship Management.
To this end, Highrise is brilliantly conceived. Everything has a web 2.0 flavor. People are in the center, and, like in social networks, the notes related to them show up in their pages, underneath a form for adding new stuff. Highrise shows each contact (or company, or deal or case) in a separate tab. For each, there is a main area and a sidebar, much like twitter in the looks.
Links and buttons to add tasks, deals, contact info etc, are located in the sidebar, while ‘history’ shows in the main area below a text box for new updates (’notes’, as they are dubbed in Highrise).
The same presentation concept applies to all the other ‘entities’: Companies, Deals, Tasks, Cases and Tags.
While Companies, Tasks and Tags are selfexplanatory, Deals and Cases need some explanations.
A ‘Deal’ is what is frequently referred in CRM software as an opportunity, while the term ‘Case‘ originates from project management and related software, and refers to interlinked but distinct/different actions and activities (=notes that track them).
Tags are used with people and companies. Feeds are available too, although this is kind of weird, as most probably, people will not want to make public the dealings with their contacts.
A very cool feature of Highrise is that it allows for updating through email. It works like this: a special email domain is generated for each user. Using ‘dropbox‘ as a recipients in this domain , you can add automatically emails sent to contacts as notes underneath each contact.
Likewise, by using ‘task+today‘ you can add tasks. A combination like ‘dropbox+today‘ can achive both at the same time.
All system events show up in a reverse chronological order in the Dashboard tab, much like in Facebook. Here you can see all activity in the system, in a neat and meaningful way. Yes, we said that already: web 2.0 flavor is prevalent!
But unlike most web 2.0 services, Highrise is not free. At least if you want to do some real work.
There are various plans with a non trivial price tag attached:
- Solo (1user, 3Gb, unlimited deals, 20K contacts) … 29$/month
- Basic (6users, 3Gb, 10 deals, 5K contacts) ..24$/month
- Plus (15users, 10Gb, unlimited deals, 20K contacts) .. 49$/month
- Premium (40users, 20Gb, unlimited deals, 30K contacts) ..99$/month
- Max (Unlimited users, 50Gb, unlimited deals, 50K contacts) ..149$/month
You can also get a free plan here, but with many limitations.
To make a quick comparison, Salesforce.com subscriptions start at 9$ per user per month and go up to 65$. Also, the price of the Premium services per year is equivalent to having your own VPS and running an open source CRM like Sugar or vtiger, which do much more than contact management and elementary CRM.
The price and the sync thing are the two areas we find in need for improvement. Otherwise Highrise aims high!
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