37signals Product Blog

Highrise Deals API

Attention developers: The Highrise API now works with the new Deals feature. Here's an introduction to the Highrise API and here's more info on how Deals work.

Coming soon: Outpost will let you manage Basecamp projects on your iPhone

Outpost (coming in August 2008 from Morfunk) promises to let you manage your Basecamp projects on your iPhone.

Take notes away from the office. Delegate tasks from the train. Check on deadlines. Upload photos to projects. Anywhere.

Sign up to get notified when it launches.

ProofHQ and Basecamp: Offer your project team richer review and approval tools

ProofHQ integration with Basecamp explains how to add ProofHQ proofs to your Basecamp projects. (ProofHQ is a web-based design collaboration, proofing and approval tool for brands, agencies, designers, print and production.)

If you use Basecamp for project management you can now offer your project team richer review and approval tools using ProofHQ.

When you create a proof in ProofHQ you can add your proof to a Basecamp project and invite project team members to review and approve your proof.

ProofHQ will automatically create a new message in the Basecamp project that you have selected when you create the proof.

The message contains details about the proof and an embedded mini-proof. The mini-proof lets your project team view all the pages of the proof, zoom and view existing comments.

If your team members want to reply to a comment, add their own mark-ups and new comments or view details of the proof, they simply click on the "Full Screen" or "New Comment" button to open the full proof with all the functions.

If you create new versions of a proof, ProofHQ will automatically create a new message in the same Basecamp project and invite the same Basecamp project members to review the new version.

This page offers the following hi-res demo movies: "How to view a proof in Basecamp," "How to create a proof for Basecamp," and "How to setup ProofHQ to link to Basecamp."

AgileAgenda: a project scheduling application that integrates with Basecamp

Marc Hughes, owner of project scheduling application AgileAgenda, wrote to tell us how the app lets a user upload their set of tasks as Basecamp Todo items.

AgileAgenda is a project scheduling application that's designed from the ground up to make it easy to create a schedule for a project, and then make it easy to maintain it when things inevitably change. It integrates with Basecamp by synchronizing it's scheduled tasks with todo items in Basecamp so you can share what tasks people should be working on. When someone marks a todo item complete in Basecamp, AgileAgenda will take that information and update the schedule the next time it's synced up. Basecamp can help get things done, AgileAgenda will tell you when that will happen.

Read more about the integration.

Here's a look at the final Basecamp result from an export:

More images: A screenshot of AgileAgenda in action and one of the Basecamp export process.

Import RSS feeds into Basecamp with telegraph

Using telegraph you can import RSS or Atom information from other systems into your Basecamp account.

The app's creator Kasper Garnæs writes:

We're a small web development company and we use Basecamp as an integral part of our development process. To integrate content from other systems into Basecamp we've built telegraph:

telegraph is a web application which handles RSS and Atom feed subscriptions for Basecamp projects. Feeds are checked on a regular basis and new entries are automatically posted as messages when they appear in the feed.

Examples of items you might want to import:

• Updates to your source control system from Unfuddle or your Trac installation


• New bugs registered in your bug tracking system such as Porchlight or FogBugz


• Buzz about your project from the blogosphere using Technorati or Google Blog Search


• Relevant links from del.icio.us


• Any content you assemble using Yahoo Pipes or Dapper

Very cool. If you come up with a neat use for telegraph, let us know.

Mailmanagr allows you to send e-mail messages to various categories within your Basecamp projects

Mailmanagr for Basecamp is now open for general use:

Mailmanagr is an e-mail interface for the popular Basecamp Web-Based Project Management system.  Whether you’ve got clients who are having trouble breaking the e-mail habit, or if you’re just looking for a solution for when you’re using your mobile phone, Mailmanagr fits the bill.

The signup email has some additional details:

Mailmanagr, in it's current form, will allow you to send e-mail messages (complete with attachments) to various categories within your Basecamp projects. You can set up an e-mail address for each category, or just set up an "E-mail dropbox" category, and create an address for that. The decision is yours!...

You can use Mailmanagr in a number of ways, here's a few ideas:

1. Create an imaginary user (mine is called Dave Helper) and set that account up with e-mail addresses. Then you can just "forward a message to Dave", and he'll post it for you.

2. Create a single catch-all category (I've used "E-mail Dropbox") and forward messages there.

3. Create addresses for each individual category on every project.

Signup for Mailmanagr.

Provide Campfire-based "Live Support Chat" with the flip of a switch using new Zendesk widget

Zendesk has put together a simple integration to Campfire so help desk agents can set up support chats with their customers/end-users.

Mikkel Svane, CEO of Zendesk.com, emailed us to let us know:

The integration is pretty basic, but people can expand it any way they want to. Zendesk is also integrated to time tracking service Harvest, and we're currently designing integration paths to both Highrise and Basecamp.

We asked Mikkel for more info and here's what he had to say:

Zendesk is for customer support what Basecamp is for project management. More than 1800 organizations have signed up for the service, and several have asked for a "live chat" feature in our product. Instead, we have used the widget interface that Zendesk provides to build an integration to Campfire.

The sample integration is very basic but Zendesk clients who embed the Javascript widget in their help desk are now able to provide "Live Support Chat" by the flip of a switch. Provided they have a Campfire account. End-users' help desk credentials are automatically transferred to the chat session.

It goes without saying that the widget can easily be extended. If for example you only want to provide live support for registered users, want to publish support conversations in your forums or want to provide 1-on-1 chats.

We ourselves have deployed it in our own help desk to demonstrate the functionality and gather some feedback, and we are considering integrating it directly in our service.

Zendesk widgets are well suited for 3rd party integrations. We have a Harvest integration that is slightly more complex, and integrations are coming to a lot of other services, including Highrise and Basecamp.

Developers: Check out the integration widget code.

Dashboard widget for Backpack Journal

The latest addition to Backpack: The Journal. And now, if you're a Mac user, you can post your status and create new journal entries right from your Dashboard thanks to Roobasoft.com's Dashboard widget.

Recently, 37signals added a Journal feature to Backpack. I wrote a little dashboard widget that uses their API and can post your status and create new journal entries.

Download BackpackJournal.wdgt

To use this, you’ll need your Backpack API Key. To get that, go to ‘my info’ and click the ‘Show your API key’

After that, enter your text in whichever field you want and hit enter. Only the field you changed will be submitted.

Developers, you can use Backpack's API to create your own add-ons for Backpack.

New version of Ta-da Lists Widget released

Having problems with your Ta-da Lists Widget? Then go ahead and download v1.3, released today. According to the developers, the new version should solve the recent issues some have experienced.

If you're not familiar with Ta-da Lists Widget, it's a free Dashboard widget for OS X that offers quick access to Ta-Da List. The widget has been downloaded over 30,000 times and lots of Ta-Da List customers love it.

How to use an Access Database and VBA to work with Highrise (or other apps)

Garry Robinson wrote an article detailing how to use Microsoft Access to query and update web sites [Database Journal]. The application he uses in the demo is Highrise. Why? Because he loves Highrise:

In this article, I am going to describe how you can use an Access Database and VBA to manipulate a Web 2 application called Highrise, a customer relationship management (CRM) tool from the highly successful Web2 company, 37Signals. Why pick this online product? The main reason is that I love using it, it has a well-written Application Programming Interface (API) and it is free for your first two hundred contacts. Why might this be relevant and interesting to you, the reader? Because you will be performing these tasks on a database that is hidden behind the security of a website, something that has always been beyond the abilities of Access.

The reason I love Highrise, is that it orders my people specific tasks (e-mailing/calling) into a wonderful list of fuzzy dates comprising today, tomorrow, this week, next week, and later and fuses that with specific dates and times like 12-june-08 4pm (see the sample task list in figure 1). Highrise also keeps track of names, addresses, correspondence relating to people and companies in quite a versatile environment. Anyway, the functionality of the website is not important, what is important is that you can interact with the data in the Highrise website through the API by posting and retrieving XML. This allows you to extend the feature list of the online application and it allows you to merge information on a website with other applications on your desktop. More than likely this is going to be a Microsoft Access database if you are reading this article.

Read the whole article to learn more about using an Access Database and VBA to work with a web app.

Related:
What GR-FX, experts at Microsoft Access and Office, likes about Basecamp
ThickToast lets you view Basecamp data in an Access database