37signals Product Blog

You can send your Basecamp or Backpack invoices to someone other than the account admin

Want to send your Basecamp or Backpack invoices to someone else besides the account administrator? Go to the Account page and choose the link "Change invoice email address and custom field." (Note: Only the account admin will see this option.) There you can specify a second email address to receive invoices. You can also enter custom text that will be included on each invoice.

Browser trouble? We can help!

If you're not seeing what you expect in one of our applications, we've created this "browser trouble" page that should get you back on track.

The page explains the following fixes:

• Empty your browser's cache
• Remove stale cookies
• Make sure your browser is up-to-date
• Check your internet connection

How to subscribe to a Google Calendar in Backpack

To subscribe to a Google Calendar in Backpack Calendar, here's what you'll need to do (this is now a slightly different process due to recent changes at Google Calendar):

1. Enter Google Calendar
2. Under "My calendars," click on the down triangle next to the calendar you'd like in Backpack
3. Click "Calendar settings"
4. Under "Private Address," right-click on the "ICAL" button and copy the link
5. Enter Backpack calendar
6. Under "Calendars," click "Add a calendar"
7. In the "Name the new calendar" field, paste the link you copied earlier. It should look something like this: http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/johndoe%40gmail.com/private-t3aa5f74174g9jkt9fa2325674ed3b0r/calendarname.ics
8. Replace the "http://www."; part with "webcal://,"; so it looks like this: webcal://google.com/calendar/ical/johndoe%40gmail.com/private-t3aa5f74174g9jkt9fa2325674ed3b0r/calendarname.ics
9. Choose a color and permissions and click the "Add calendar" button.

If you want other Google Calendars on your Backpack Calendar, just repeat the process for each.

WSJ: Backpack helps small businesses, agencies and entrepreneurs

The Wall Street Journal offers a look at sites that offer free software tools for managing a business and gives a shoutout to Backpack.

Backpack helps small businesses, agencies and entrepreneurs keep and track to-do lists, notes and other documents, discussions and schedules all in one spot.

Reviews of Satchel, app that brings Backpack to iPhone/iPad

In "How an Oregon lawyer uses Highrise to manage clients and Backpack to GTD," Joshua M. Barrett discusses how he uses the Satchel app. He uses it to bring Backpack to his iPhone and iPad in order to manage to-do items and pages while on the go.

Here are a couple of reviews of Satchel.

Satchel is Backpack on the iPhone done right (finally) [TUAW]:

While you may be a little hesitant to drop the $9.99US on this one, I can say that it's worth every penny for the true Backpack fanatic. It's gone a long way to removing the barrier for those looking to embrace Backpack as a service, but feeling a little hamstrung by the lack of a decent mobile interface. If you love Backpack, you'll love Satchel [App Store].

Satchel The Backpack Client is a Full-Featured Organizational Tool [AppCraver]:

[Satchel] is an excellent tool for anyone seeking to organize a business, club, family, or other type of group where everyone needs to be kept up to date about projects and tasks. It serves as a good replacement for the paper-based calendars or stream of e-mails that some organizations still use to try to maintain contact.

There are other Backpack Extras too. (Note: Satchel and these other Extras are third-party products. They are not made by 37signals.)

How an Oregon lawyer uses Highrise to manage clients and Backpack to GTD

Joshua M. Barrett, an attorney at Black Helterline in Portland, sent us an email detailing how he uses Highrise as a biz dev and marketing tool and Backpack to manage to-dos.

I use Highrise as my business development / marketing tool. Existing clients, potential clients, referral sources, etc. are all contacts in Highrise. I bcc: my email correspondence with these people to Highrise so I can keep track of my discussions with them. I use tasks to schedule follow up items so I maintain consistent contact with the people that matter most to my business development efforts. I also add important dates like first met and a periodic check-in dates which automatically trigger tasks. I use the 37signals Highrise app on my iPhone to manage these relationships on the go.

I use Backpack to manage my to-dos. I use a GTD methodology and use different pages for different contexts. For collaborative projects, I’ll create a separate backpack page and share it with other participants to make sure we are all working together. I write a blog about use of the iPad in the legal profession, tabletlegal.com. I use a separate page to capture post ideas, text snippets, blog to-dos and the like. I use Satchel for the iPhone and iPad to manage my to-do items and pages while on the go.

Powerful but lightweight, cost-effective and easy to use products. Thanks, guys.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.

Illinois church finds "the perfect solution" in Highrise and Backpack

Dave Brazzle of the Immanuel Lutheran Church in Palatine, IL explains how the church and school uses Highrise and Backpack.

I am an Elder (lay leadership) at Immanuel Lutheran Church And School, located here in Palatine IL (a suburb of Chicago). In both our church and PK-8th grade school, we have fully embraced both Highrise and Backpack. To this powerful duo, we have added Formstack (formally Formspring), which is a web-based “Forms” resource. Here’s the story...
 
At our church, we have 13 Elders. Our elders are closely allied with our Pastor in doing ministry and keeping in contact with our members. Each of the Elders are assigned a subset of our membership, to whom they are responsible for keeping in touch, forming relationships and gathering feedback for the leadership. Reaching for such a goal requires an organized approach that fosters continuity, visibility, discipline and self-accountability. In searching for a viable solution, we had many requirements, not the least of which were security, confidentiality, reliability, remote-access, ease-of-use and many functional requirements. We finally stumbled upon the perfect solution; Highrise.

Highrise
We securely exported our church’s ACS database (a commonly used church database), processed and formatted the data using a custom–designed Excel spreadsheet, and then uploaded the resulting contacts into Highrise. Of critical significance, this spreadsheet allowed us to capture and maintain contact information, including birthdays, anniversaries, email addresses, phone numbers etc, from our church database, and automatically include them in the Highrises’ Background Information frame for each contact! We now have the ability to securely and responsibly maintain and (when appropriate) share our contact conversations. Higrise’s permissions features allow us to control access, limit visibility and protect confidentiality, as context requires.

We have begun using Highrise’s “Tasks” feature to contact members on their birthdays, wedding anniversaries, baptismal anniversaries and on the anniversaries of the death of loved ones. Tasks are also used to schedule periodic “maintenance” contacts or to schedule special follow-up contacts as appropriate. It all works perfectly. 

Backpack
But wait, there’s more! We also are very heavy users of 37signals’ Backpack. Here, our problem was that we had dozens of ministries operating within the church and school. All of them had a need to communicate their missions, goals, resource needs, accomplishments, pictures, how to join in their ministry, etc. Yet few (well, OK one) of them were web-savvy enough to do anything about it. Although we have a Director of Technology on staff, his time is always in very heavy demand. The time required for dozens of ministries to each explain what they want to communicate on our church/school website(s) would be overwhelming. All of these ministries knew what they want to say, but they didn’t have a good, efficient and timely way of saying it.

The answer turned out to be Backpack. We now have dozens of pages, each one of them is literally “owned” by a ministry, a board, or a teacher in our school. It takes only a couple of hours to show them how to use Backpack... even for people who initially tell you that they “don’t do computers.” Many of them report that they have found their “page” empowering. Updates to these ministry pages occur daily, without consuming even a minute of our church’s staff. Each of the ministry Backpack pages, are transparently linked-to and accessed from our church’s main website page. People clicking on these links, scarcely even know that they have left our “normal” web site.

Interview with project manager who uses Backpack as part of his "Getting Things Done" system

Design Feaster recently posted an interview with Steve Dale, a project manager, who uses Backpack as part of his practice of David Allen's method "Getting Things Done."

I keep a notebook with me at all times and use a paid 37Signals’ Backpack subscription to manage my personal GTD system (above image). I’ve investigated other apps, but find a combination of pen, paper and Backpack works for me. I occasionally use Satchel, an iPhone app for Backpack, but pen and paper are usually quicker for capturing things when I’m not at a computer.

Read the full interview.

Pemba: "Working from the Cloud makes us more collaborative and effective"

In "The PEMBAway: Our Heads Really Are In The Cloud," Brad Werntz talks about which tools the collective of outdoor industry sales specialists use to get things done.

In their suite of tools, we use Highrise for managing contacts, Basecamp for managing projects, and Backpack for managing ideas. In Highrise, we can see up-to-the-moment information for anybody we ever contact, we can assign tasks and follow-up, and comment on ongoing issues involving real people. Basecamp helps us to work on large projects as a group, laid out cleanly with benchmarks and goals clearly defined. Backpack gives us a place where we can foster ideas or solve problems; it’s a meeting space that doesn’t require us actually to meet. But this is true for each of these tools: With them, we can meet about important stuff, get things done in real time, and all in ways that don’t require us to sit down together and hash everything out.

With eight of us going in a million different directions, we can’t underscore enough how important this is...

For some of the “extra” stuff that’s part of the PEMBAway (our blog, newsletters, forms and surveys) we use WordPress, MailChimp, and FormStack. These all integrate seamlessly with each other, and with Google and 37Signals, too. For example, do you want to schedule an appointment with us? We have a webpage for that, that shows our availability via Tungle; pick a time and it drops into our individual Google Calendars, and sends a confirmation to everybody via Gmail, which is then easily logged into Highrise and/or – as needed – Backpack. All of this happens more or less automatically.

The full piece offers info on lots more tools too.

Is your mobile phone service supported by Backpack SMS reminders?

Backpack customer Lenin Yee asks if SMS reminders work with cellphones in Mexico. Here's how to check if your mobile phone service is supported:

1. Backpack > click "My info" on the top right of the page.

2. Under "Mobile phone reminders" click on the "Select a service..." pulldown menu (shown on right).

3. If your mobile phone service is listed, you should be all set! If not, let us know by submitting an official support request.