37signals Product Blog

Hubot, GitHub's valiant Campfire bot, expands his capabilities

In his Automating Inefficiencies screencast, Zach Holman (left) showed some of the goofy ways GitHub uses animated gifs, inside jokes, and hacks to make their Campfire chat room more fun.

Now he's got a followup piece, Why GitHub Hacks on Side Projects, which talks about the importance of building out "a side project culture." For GitHub, a Campfire bot that does all sorts of kooky things is the answer.

Hubot, our valiant Campfire bot, has continued to grow in complexity. A tiny list of his (current) capabilities:

• unlock the door to our office
• print out a list of the people currently in the office based on their wifi presence
• find an apartment in the area to rent
• deploy GitHub
• say an arbitrary string over the office speakers
• play an audio sample of deadmau5 to everyone through hacked Propane HTML5
• give you a quote from any movie or TV show
• tell you the build status of any git branch
• track and map packages
• SMS any GitHubber from Campfire
• embed a seven day weather forecast

We’re building more and more into Hubot every day. (Before you ask, no, he’s not open source yet, and yes, a few people are working on that.)

Read the full piece to learn why Zach thinks having pleasant distractions and an open, shared space to explore together is important.

DTS International: "The 37signals Suite takes the useless shit and clutter out of productivity solutions"

Trevor O'Sullivan, General Manager at DTS International, recently wrote us:

We have officially switched over to the 37signals Suite as of the last 3 weeks and we're loving it — thanks for building such an awesome product and taking the useless shit and clutter out of productivity solutions.

We followed up with Trevor to find out more about how his team is using the Suite. His response is below.

The search begins
We are a multifaceted company with several focuses all within the training and development market. Initially, we werte only looking for a CRM and I started looking at products around the place like Highrise and other online CRM tools - we were then using a product hosted on our own server. This search started in late 2009 during our Christmas holiday season in Australia but never went anywhere as I decided it was all too hard!

On initial review, I thought Highrise was too "entry level" and simply lacked features we needed like reporting and other common CRM features. This year we hired an absolute gun of a sales person and she has made a huge difference to our business. Since most of her time is spent telephone prospecting she came to me with her concerns/challenges with the CRM and how difficult it was making her job to fill in lots of fields or data we never used, the slow search capabilities (as we had around 20000 contacts) and the all around cumbersome nature of our existing CRM.

Hence I started looking again at CRM options and came back to Highrise. Still thinking it lacked key features without using third party applications and API function development from our end we decided to "try it out" it for a week. Once that week was over, our team was begging me to make the switch all the way. So we did!

Just after upgrading to a paid account 37signals came out with their new Suite offering and we had to have it — as we had started to play with the free version of Basecamp and Backpack and had fallen in love with them too!

Highrise
We have a database of around 10,000 customers and prospects (since making the switch we did a massive data clean and removed useless and duplicates from our CRM). For us, it is about tracking the interactions with customers and prospects, hence we use the notes and email dropbox heavily. We have started using the Tasks and Deals sections more and more to keep track of the deals we have in the pipeline and things we need to get done with different contacts.

Basecamp
We have just completed a business plan for our business (yes, I know plans are guesses!). But, for me, the business planning process is about the analysis and getting a feel for what we have to work with and then I can make better decisions in the moment. The plan/analysis produced around 8 pages of todos for us to work on to improve our business.

Every time I looked at the list is was so intimidated I stuck it back on the desk and looked for something else to keep me busy! One day I was watching the Basecamp videos and thought, "Let's set up a project." At that time, we only had the free version so had to use one project called "business plan todos" and divide up the list with our team, then create a rule in the business that at 4:30pm we stop what we are doing and spend 30 minutes to cross one thing of the list. It has been great we are so far in front of where I thought we would be. It is amazing and our team loves it because the can see how they are contributing to the business!

How The Intersect Fund uses 37signals products to help aspiring business owners

Joe Shure, Associate Director of The Intersect Fund, describes how his team uses 37signals products to help aspiring business owners:

We help aspiring business owners — mostly immigrants and low-income individuals — get started. We teach them how to manage cash flow, find customers and set their businesses up right. We also offer small loans to help them buy things like hot dog carts, new truck tires and sewing machines.

Since starting the company in 2008, we've served more than 150 clients through our business training, lending and consulting services. We now have offices in two New Jersey cities — New Brunswick and Orange — but we began as a rag-tag bunch of college students, borrowing space and building contacts as we grew. We got where we are now through lots of work, a little luck, and 37signals.

Getting the word out was our first step. In the beginning, we met with community leaders, church pastors and potential funders on what seemed like a daily basis. Lacking an office, a staff, or even a file cabinet, we leaned on Highrise to help us manage our new relationships.

Now, we use Campfire to keep in touch at the office, Highrise to keep up with clients and Backpack to track tasks and commitments.

(Pictured at left: Soneni, a second-hand clothing store owner and Intersect Fund client.)

Consider a hypothetical client named Tamara — a seamstress — as an example:

Oct. 2010: Tamara enrolls in our business training course. Along the way, we keep tabs on certain goals: is she grasping the material? Is she writing her business plan? Is she gaining confidence in her abilities? The instructor makes weekly Highrise notes that help our team understand how Tamara is doing.

Dec. 2010: Having graduated, Tamara seeks a small loan to purchase a sewing machine. Her financials are in order, but our loan committee wonders about how responsible she is. They check her Highrise file and read her instructor's notes: turns out she came to every class on time and did great work. They approve her loan.

Feb. 2011: Things are going well, and we meet with Tamara to help her set business milestones: she wants to design a new handbag line, find 10 new customers and purchase a domain name.

(Pictured at right: "My co-founder, Rohan Mathew, and I standing in front of a bunch of oranges.")

Six weeks later, our team member Pasquale invites Tamara to the office for another meeting. He doesn't know her too well, but he can get up to speed in seconds by checking her Highrise file. He learns exactly how much progress she's made since joining us, and he makes sure to ask her about the goals she set last time.

Tamara's new handbag line is a hit. She's selling a ton of them online, and she easily repays her Intersect Fund loan. Our role was to understand the obstacles she faced and nudge her toward manageable goals.

If we merely offered microloans and business training, we would be a decent nonprofit. But our ambitions are higher: we want to be the trusted ally of those seeking success in the face of adversity. This means actually knowing our clients — their difficulties, their needs, and where they want to go. 37signals lets us build the tight connections that enable us to make a real impact.

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

How the engineering department at ShermansTravel Media uses Campfire to communicate

ShermansTravel Media is a two-part organization. It aggregates and syndicates travel deals and content, and also has a luxury travel magazine. Eric Lubow, Email Systems Administrator at ShermansTravel, talks about how the company uses Campfire below.

Why do you need Campfire?
Currently our engineering department is the only department in the company that uses Campfire.  Other parts of our business use Basecamp, but the engineering team primarily uses Campfire to communicate.  We do this because we have a team of 8 individuals that work out of 3 or more separate physical locations.  One of those individuals works out of Manchester, UK while the rest of us share the US east coast time zone.

How do you use the product and why do you like it?
It is now part of everyone's routine that when they sit down at their computer, they login to Campfire to start their day.  Campfire allows us to communicate without being intrusive.  IM can be excessively intrusive and distracting at times because it is an "in your face" method of getting someone's attention and involving them in a conversation.  Campfire also has the added ability of letting the QA folks send a quick screenshot to the group if something doesn't seem right.  It's also useful for sharing files that wouldn't normally be shared via Google Docs or Basecamp.

Which features do you use most?
The Campfire API (less the API and more straight Ruby code) allows our application to interact with us.  When our syndication feeds go stale on a particular host, we have a cronjob send an image of Frodo from Lord of the Rings into our channel telling us to fix the feeds.  Every time someone commits to the subversion repository, a commit hook is fired off and the commit message along with the file names that were updated are put into the chat for everyone to see. We also make use of the '@' autocomplete syntax because we have multiple Matt's who are in the chat room.


Most of us use Mac and have additionally "hooked up" Campfire to growl so we are notified when someone is either talking about us or talking about something we need to know about. We use some of the Greasemonkey scripts that have been written to interface with Campfire.

(Click for larger version.) A screenshot of ShermansTravel's Campfire instance with a few Nagios alerts. Learn more about this Nagios notify-by-Campfire Plugin.

What did you use before and why did you switch? 
The sad fact is that we used a combination of IM, Trac, and Basecamp.  They are all great fits for their purpose in their own right, but didn't meet our needs for unintrusive on the spot communication.

Tell us a story about a project or situation where the product helped you out.
We recently cut over ISPs and in order to achieve this, we needed everyone in the same place at the same time.  We could have had a conference call, but that call would have involved nearly 15 people all with their own issues all fighting to get a word in. So we went with Campfire and opened it up publicly.  We had our internal 8 team members there along with representation from our new ISP and our database managed service providers.

Everyone was working from a different location and if someone needed to talk to someone else verbally, everyone had everyone else's cell phones, Skype names, and we always had the fallback Campfire conference line provided.  None of that was needed, we were able to work it all out via the Campfire chat.

Any tips or tricks for other customers?
Look into available Greasemonkey scripts.  The user autocomplete and the Growl interaction makes the use of Campfire even easier.  Most of the engineers use Fluid.App for Mac for the Greasemonkey scripts.  The idea is to keep it in a window separate from your default browser because your browser has a tendency to crash.


Anything else?
As with any engineering department in a small business, we are working on an average of no less than 5 - 10 projects at once. Campfire allows multiple discussions to happen simultaneously and all participants to see things that may be more pertinent to them at another time.

UK/Indonesia team leader gives four reasons why using Campfire to communicate can be better than voice discussions

Bruce Greig runs KeepMeBooked, a web-based app for guesthouse and B&B owners to manage their reservations and guests, and take online bookings. Below he describes how his team uses Campfire.

I'm in the UK and I run a small team of developers who are based in Indonesia. Dealing with complex issues over the phone can be hard even in your mother tongue - so you have to be super-fluent in a second language to be able to use it for detailed discussions over the telephone. The Indonesia team speak great English, but not quite good enough for the telephone. So we use Campfire instead of voice.

I originally considered this a compromise. I thought, well, communication might be a little harder, but that will be worth it because the cost of living (therefore cost of employment) is so much lower in Indonesia than in the UK.

Turns out it's not a compromise at all, and I now think that using Campfire to communicate is better than voice discussions, even face-to-face discussions, for discussing really complicated detailed issues. Here's why:

1. You can take your time. You can stop and think for as long as you need mid-discussion. It's awkward to do that over the phone or when standing next to someone.

2. You review what you say before you say it. You can't do that with your spoken voice. If you are speaking, you never notice your own slip of the tongue, so you might end up talking for a few minutes at cross purposes before you figure out the confusion. With Campfire, I always re-read what I just typed and either correct it before sending, or immediately afterwards.

3. You have a written record of what you all said, which is super-helpful when you forget why, exactly, you thought that doing such-and-such was a good idea. You can go back and read through your exact thought process and get everything clear in your head again. I find it so satisfying to re-read how we came to solve some complex problems, I often find myself browsing through Campfire transcripts just for the fun of it! ("Ah yes, that old multi-currency, cross-border PayPal gateway pricing conundrum, that was a beauty. Aren't we clever to have figured that out.")

4. In-line images. Throwing a screenshot or Balsamiq mockup into the conversation is also super-helpful. You can't easily do that over the phone either ("I'll email it to you. ... You got the email yet? No? ... Still no? OK, let's wait a couple minutes ... etc.")

Populi: "Campfire has all but replaced the reply-all email noise that used to plague the office"

Isaac Grauke is CEO at Populi, a company that makes web-based College Management software. Below he describes how his team uses 37signals products.

We build software designed around a lot of the principles expounded in Getting Real and REWORK, principles which are all but absent in the college software market. Between our Sales and Development teams, our day-to-day work revolves around Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire.

Basecamp
Basecamp does a lot of heavy lifting at Populi. We use it to keep track of development and customer implementation, and to germinate a lot of our web marketing & support documentation.

We group our development activities—whether tracking bugs & fixes, adding new features, improving old ones, and so on—into individual Projects. For instance, we have the “Dev General” project, into which we funnel a lot of the routine, across-the-board stuff (like bugfixes, optimization, etc.). Development projects that require special, focused attention get their own project—our recent Bookstore release was one such item.

Implementation for new customers generally follows a particular pattern, so projects are a natural fit for that. When we sign a new college, we set up a unique implementation project for them, and plug away at it using milestones and to-do’s.

The various writing projects at Populi fit in under Documentation (official stuff like Terms of Service, help documentation, internal company docs) or Website (marketing text for the external site, as well as look & feel code updates). Obviously, these projects are heavy on the Writeboards and To-do’s. Comparing different versions of copy in Writeboard makes it sooo simple to update website text or giant docs like the Terms of Service.

Highrise
Highrise manages our sales leads and correspondence of note with existing customers. It has been a tremendous help to our sales staff; previously they used a half-hearted combination of Salesforce and an internal Populi checkout. Salesforce had a zillion features that didn’t do anybody any good; Populi is built for colleges, not salesmen. Highrise handles everything we need it for with ease — even the guys here who only rarely need to look at it find what they’re after within a few seconds.

Campfire
Campfire is where we discuss a lot of the stuff that’s going on in Basecamp and Highrise. If someone has a question or issue or idea that’s worth the entire company’s feedback, it goes there first. Also, it has replaced internal email for sharing links (work-related and otherwise). For our internal discussions, it’s so much better than what we did before—reply-all emails, individual chats, meetings and mini-meetings—that it’s hardly worth comparing them.

The Populi team hunkers down with REWORK.

Fitting in with Populi
The 37signals apps are a great fit for Populi and how we like to do things. Being in the web-based software business ourselves, that aspect of the apps is just a no-brainer for us. Since we have a rather “informal” company culture, we have no need to chart how robustly we leverage synergies to get maximum ROI. The apps do pretty much what we need them to do. They replaced a lot of software — besides the stopgaps that Highrise replaced, Basecamp did away with an old TRAC system for development and a barfbag of shared folders and documents for our other uses, and Campfire has all but replaced the reply-all email noise that used to plague the office.

One surprising thing about the apps is how easily they let us tweak or adjust our workflows. As I write this, we’re considering some significant changes to how we organize Development projects, and one thing we’ve noticed is that Basecamp will make that process short and virtually painless.

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

Twitter engineers use Campfire to communicate

Apple profiles Twitter and along the way mentions the engineering team there uses Campfire to communicate.

When software engineering teams work in multiple group chats, they use Campfire, a web-based group chat service for the Mac and iPhone.