By popular demand, today we’re adding a new feature to the 37signals Suite that lets you quickly create a Basecamp Classic project from a Highrise deal. If you routinely create projects from your deals this feature will make your suite a little sweeter.
Before we launched this feature the process of setting up a project from a deal was cumbersome. After you won a deal in Highrise you had to navigate over to your Basecamp Classic account, click the create project button and then copy and paste the deal details into the project form. If you needed to invite some of your Highrise contacts to the project you had to set them up one at a time after the project was created. Since there was no way to import their contact information from Highrise you had to manually copy and paste all that data into Basecamp Classic.
Now you can skip all that busy work – just click the new “Start a Basecamp Classic project” button after you mark a deal as won in Highrise:
When you click this button you’ll see the new deal-to-project form in Basecamp Classic. All the fields are pre-filled with sensible defaults from your deal and you can add people from Highrise with a single click:
When you’ve finished reviewing the form you can create your project and get to work immediately.
This feature was built on the foundation we laid with 37ID (our single sign-on system) and the 37signals Suite that we launched last year. The Suite includes Basecamp Classic, Backpack, Campfire and Highrise in a single monthly subscription. The deal-to-project integration we’re debuting today is only available in the Suite so if you’re currently using Basecamp Classic and Highrise but you haven’t upgraded to the Suite now is a great time to make the leap.
We hope this new integration between Highrise and Basecamp Classic makes the 37signals Suite even more useful for you. Thanks for being a 37signals customer.
37signals wrote this on Jul 25 2011 There are 96 comments.
Ryan Jenkins 25 Jul 11
Brilliant!
Jason Wietholter 25 Jul 11
Great integration! Especially the “Add new people from Highrise” feature of the form.
Thanks!
Iarfhlaith Kelly 25 Jul 11
Very smart guys. A nice new feature.
It’d be great to see some more integrations like this across the suite. But I suspect that’ll all happen in due course.
Keep them coming!
p.s. Haven’t visited SvN in a while. I know you abandoned the redesign and it’s not a top priority, but might be worth giving it a bit of TLC . You owe it that much :)
Alex 25 Jul 11
And finally someone has heard my prayers!
Thanks God! (or 37signals team…)
Steve Huber 25 Jul 11
Smart. Well done!
Don Dalrymple 25 Jul 11
As always, elegant and well thought through. It will cut out cycles from the deal to the project creation. Thanks for continually pushing productivity.
Thomas Capone 25 Jul 11
Love it. Now go solve the debit crisis, please. You can do it!
Mark 25 Jul 11
Nice, but would also be great to have access to this even if you don’t have the whole suite. Currently, only need Highrise and Basecamp which subscribe to, not the whole suite.
Amy Coats 25 Jul 11
Will it let you track hours (at an hourly rate) against the deal, so you can estimate time vs. actual time spent? That would be awesome.
Michael Schleifer 25 Jul 11
Thank you!
Alec Kinnear 25 Jul 11
Great, Michael. Long overdue but very, very welcome.
Could you please make sure to allow project templates with these deal conversions? Most of our converted deals fall into one of two elaborate templates.
Thanks!
Eric Amundson 25 Jul 11
Terrific addition, thanks!
This will smooth out our internal workflow cut a significant amount of time moving a project from the sales to production stage.
With a small, tightly-run office, saving 10 minutes on something we do daily is HUGE .
Thanks 37signal’ers and keep up the great, user-focused work! :)
Vince LaVecchia 25 Jul 11
Nice job y’all. Makes the circle somewhat more complete. Now if we could just get paid earlier from those Wins!
VRL
Charlie Matz 25 Jul 11
I agree with Alec. This is amazing, but creating these with the use of a template would help immensely. We too use templates when launching 99% of our new jobs.
Rufus 25 Jul 11
I too would like to see this work for users of just Highrise and Basecamp. I’m a subscriber of Highrise only at the moment.
Ben Garvey 25 Jul 11
Great start. Used it today and it imported the contacts. Best improvement would be to import notes as messages and all attached files.
Sonny Sultani 25 Jul 11
AWESOME !!!! just when I thought you guys had stopped the innovation factory you come out with this.
Biljana Zelenovic 25 Jul 11
Great. This was the feature we were waiting for. Thanks.
Melissa 25 Jul 11
Fantastic addition, all. I’d also like to cast my vote for integration with project templates along with Alec and Charlie above. We’ve spent a lot of time getting our template in shape and would love to use this new feature!
37signals 25 Jul 11
Alec and Charlie, you can use project templates when you create a project from the deal. You’ll see the option to select a template in the top-right corner of the page when you’re on the deal-to-project form. The screenshot in this post came from an account without any templates and that’s why that option doesn’t appear in the image.
Melissa 25 Jul 11
You all are way ahead of us. I just saw that you CAN choose a project template for your Highrise deal turned Basecamp project. Thank you!!
Brian Agnew 25 Jul 11
Love it! However, I would also like to see the ability to choose people to bring over to Basecamp from Highrise once the deal is won. Currently, you still have to copy and paste “people” contact information to invite them to the project.
GP 25 Jul 11
Nice one guys, we’ll be trying it out asap! Are there any plans for more integration between the suite apps Highrise <-> Basecamp?
We’d love to see any of these features: - Cross-post messages from Basecamp to Highrise notes and vice versa - Link/Add people to projects in Basecamp from Highrise
John Rizzo 25 Jul 11
Cheers 37 signals team! Great to see this integration streamlining
Jared Chamberlain 25 Jul 11
I’m looking forward to this integration for our Real Estate business… Going to be awesome! Thanks guys!
MelissaS 25 Jul 11
Yes! A step in the right direction. Keep it up! It’ll be great to skip all the extra work especially if it gives you the option to import all the highrise messages related to that deal into the basecamp project.
Now, the next step will be having the option in basecamp to associate highrise people with current basecamp projects. It has been so annoying that you can’t associate highrise people with projects that are in basecamp. It would be so much easier if I could look a client up in Highrise and be able to see a hyperlinked list of all the projects they are involved in.
When I bought the suite, I got the impression that it was going to be like a hotel suite – connected programs to be used together. Instead, it’s like I bought three totally separate applications. The fact that they don’t really work together has been pretty disappointing because it means double work. Other than that, I am a big fan.
Another helpful feature would be to have a search tool on the Launchpad that would search all four accounts. So, the results could include previous chats/conversations, backpack pages, contacts, projects… everything. There has been more than a few times when that would have been great for me.
Tena Moore 25 Jul 11
YES ! YES! YES !
We just started using Highrise in addition to Basecamp and everyone wanted to know if it could do this… but I assured them it would happen someday. ;) It did – thank you!
The only thing is that the ‘start a project’ button doesn’t show up for us when we click ‘won’. Hoping that will happen soon. Am I missing anything? We just need Basecamp and Highrise, correct?
Thanks! Tena
Ben Kinnaird 25 Jul 11
Thank you for this, I have been waiting a while… It won’t save a lot of time but it will save it a lot of times over :)
@Melissa, I like your idea for HR to show projects that people are involved in. Perhaps more use for people not familiar with individual contacts like a remote PA etc but I can see it being useful
Daniel Burns 25 Jul 11
Still not working… Just hit “Won” for a highrise deal and did not see the new button come up…
sigh 25 Jul 11
Sigh, you missed the point entirely. All this really does is fills out the title of the basecamp project for me, which saves all of 30 seconds. The basecamp project is blank. At the very minimum, the case history should be viewable from the project page for reference.
We (your paying customers) want these to work together. This is just a one-off convenience button. It should feel like a seamless and smooth transition from deal to project rather than a button that fills out the title for me.
Davest 25 Jul 11
THANK YOU !!!!!!
JF 25 Jul 11
Daniel Burns: Still not working… Just hit “Won” for a highrise deal and did not see the new button come up…
Are you using Highrise as part of the 37signals Suite, or are you using Highrise outside of the Suite? This is a Suite-only feature.
Trevor 25 Jul 11
We too would love for this to be available to all users of Basecamp and Highrise, not just subscribers to the Suite. If these are the 2 products that fit my workflow, why should we be excluded from the functionality?
I don’t have to pay extra to make any of my other tools play nice together.
Hope there’s more integration and consistency across tools to come.
Mina 25 Jul 11
Awesome!!! Great work!
Terri 25 Jul 11
This is a great first step! I tried this and was able to select a template (thank you!) but it didn’t transfer over the notes or files that are the background of the project. :( Coming soon?
Drea 25 Jul 11
Love this new feature. I also didn’t see the button when I marked a deal ‘Won’ BUT I clicked where the button should be and it still worked. They are probably just still working out some kinks on the back end… great new addition especially since it works so easily with the existing templates!
George Bounacos 25 Jul 11
I will be upgrading to the suite just because the integration is finally beginning.
JF 25 Jul 11
Trevor: Just to set expectations… We’ll be focusing all our integration energy on the Suite. It’s clearer, simpler, and easier for everyone since we know exactly which HR account links to which BC account, etc. Outside of the Suite someone could have multiple accounts for each product which can make things complicated pretty quickly.
Luke 25 Jul 11
Great! But I hope it works with Case as well.
Garry 26 Jul 11
Is there a technical reason why you need the suite or is it simply a marketing reason ? I have basecamp and barely use highrise, this could push my highrise use a bit but the suite, unlikely.
JF 26 Jul 11
Garry: Technically anything is possible, but the Suite makes integration significantly simpler for us and our customers because each Suite only has one Highrise, Basecamp, Campfire, and Backpack. So when you turn a Highrise deal into a Basecamp project, Highrise knows exactly which Basecamp account it should talk to. This means customers don’t have to do any manual linking/unlinking to set up integration. We want to make things that just work instead of things that require configuration and specification.
Brenda 26 Jul 11
Love this new feature, one problem… the go to basecamp graphic is mia. When I roll the mouse over the space where it belongs it is click-able and it takes you to the new setup but no graphics initially.
Keep up the great work..new suite member.
Brenda
Zach 26 Jul 11
Awesome.
Hope this is the start of lots of integration within the Suite… ;)
Dean Holmes 26 Jul 11
Nice Job guys. I know this has been on the docket for a while. Nice thing is when you do roll a feature out, it’s done right. Period. That’s why loyalty is strong with 37S.
Cat Matson 26 Jul 11
Great integration … and I echo the other comments about wanting the integration to apply even if I don’t use the whole suite … I don’t have any need for the other apps in the suite … but I LOVE highrise and bas camp … don’t see why I should be penalised … or why i should have to upgrade my current monthly spend just to access this new feature.
I’ve seen your comment above about ‘integrating’ with the ‘right’ account … I know very little about back-end programming … but surely if I can log-in to the ‘right’ accounts through Launchpad, then each app I do subscribe to can talk to each other without being confused.
Ditte Hammarström 26 Jul 11
Thank you. You made my day :)
IT Chimes 26 Jul 11
template and this integration would be awesome.
Casper Scholly 26 Jul 11
Nice going – Magic! – I love that there is constant development in a web app.
theSEOguy 26 Jul 11
The whole suit of products should be a standard in tertiary education.
Had I know about your solutions when I started business I would have been much further in a heck of a lot less time!
Seriously love your work :)
Thanks peeps
Peter 26 Jul 11
thanks. nice. so we do now have the long awaited feature of highrise integration (https://answers.37signals.com/basecamp/2305-how-do-i-import-companies-and-contacts-from-highrise-to-basecamp).
and also we do now have a great workaround for importing contacts into basecamp 1. make a stupid nonsense deal 2. make it won 3. create a project 4. import contacts
come on! why not just make “import contact from highrise” when creating a new project in basecamp? or more easy: anytime i add/change a person to a project. f*, that would be really easy!
Greg Lusk 26 Jul 11
brilliant.
one suggestion for improvement:
After you´ve created the project in highrise by clicking “create a basecamp project” is it possible to then choose one of your templates in basecamp??
please!
Arthur Dagard 26 Jul 11
what about a deal for Highrise & Basecamp for thoses who don’t need the all package ?
Fred Reillier 26 Jul 11
Great news ! This issue made me look for an alternative to 37 Signals suite… No more reasons to leave now !
Red Tiger 26 Jul 11
Brilliant, nice to see some integration at last!
Bartosz 26 Jul 11
I can’t see button “Start Basecamp ….” can you explain me why ?
Fred Reillier 26 Jul 11
I have a quite simple suggestion for improving the Suite’s integration : a global dashboard page (maybe the launchpad page) displaying a list of all my tasks from Basecamp, Highrise and Backpack. This would be great, really, to live with one todolist instead of three.
Bartosz 26 Jul 11
I see ! what a pity you don’t told us about it’s only suite feature :((
Jimmy Puckett 26 Jul 11
Thanks so much, this is going to be a huge time saver for us.
Alex Faiers 26 Jul 11
Awesome – simply awesome. Thank you guys
emtwo 26 Jul 11
Great work!
But one small PROBLEM : Firefox 4 not showing the button, the link is there invisible but thr graphic for the button isn’t.
JF 26 Jul 11
After you´ve created the project in highrise by clicking “create a basecamp project” is it possible to then choose one of your templates in basecamp??
Yes it is.
Jt 26 Jul 11
Looking great as usual! Seems like a logical and useful feature to have. It’s just not that amazing for me to start paying for two more products in order to get this small enhancement. I get it though. Good luck with the Suite sales!
Jeff 26 Jul 11
This is great! It would be great if we could have an ‘Add new people from Highrise’ to assign people to an exisiting Basecamp project. Is this possible? If not, this would be a great extension of this functionality.
Dave 26 Jul 11
Looks great but why is it only available to “Suite” customers? I use Basecamp and Highrise but have no need for the other two. So because of that I don’t get the new integration features? Seems very “un-37 signals-ish” (I think I just invented a new word)......
Troy 26 Jul 11
Thanks so much guys! This is a great improvement, now I do have to have double entry work!
Ola Ayeni 26 Jul 11
Like facebook, you guys are slow. This feature we have been begging for, for so long finally came and you are SLAMMING people with this idea that we must be a suite user in order to enjoy a reasonable feature ? That is silly. We only use basecamp and closed our highrise account because this feature is what we needed but it was not available. Many of the other tools use have, we do not need.
If you read people’s comment Jason and team, your customers think this makes no sense.
troy 26 Jul 11
what, wait… it does not work for me? ‘cause I do not have the Suite? Argh… I pay for BOTH products. We this is a Sh** kicker. COME ON :-{
Alec Kinnear 26 Jul 11
Garry, Trevor, Cat, Dave: I’m usually the last one to stick up for JF but this time I have to say he’s absolutely right.
There is almost no real world situation where it makes sense not to take two products and not the suite. Just Highrise and Basecamp alone with middle sized accounts come to $149. The suite is the same price and you get a huge Backpack account (we’ve started to use Backpack extensively as well) and Campfire (which we don’t use for now as we have a Skype workflow which works but will probably switch soon).
We wrote an article about the suite upgrade economics which covers the upgrade in more detail.
That said the sync between Highrise and Freshbooks | Basecamp and Freshbooks really could use some work (to be polite). In both cases, it’s one way data dump which creates redundant data.
Alec Kinnear 26 Jul 11
Hi 37signals,
I’ve tried the feature. I included five people on the deal, including the client. The project template option was there but when I get to the other side, I find not much got across:
1. Company details are not filled in (the details were with the company owner on the Highrise side, perhaps if they were with the company they would get across). Any company info had to be filled in by hand.
2. People involved in the deal (two people from my company, one external contractor and the company owner) were not included in the project, meaning all people had to be added afterwards. I can sort of see the how and why of this, but how about an intermediate screen here where we can choose what people to include in the new project?
Thanks for listening (I’m an optimist).
Alec Kinnear 26 Jul 11
Even when the company has quite full contact info in Highrise, one has to add the company info by hand while creating the project. The “Since this is a new client…” doesn’t take any account apart from the name of the company of all that wonderful info stored in Highrise.
Please develop the integration further, Signals. The current implementation would not be a pass on a programming test for employment at Foliovision: almost no data is passed from Highrise to Basecamp (project name only).
The only advantage the Deal integration has at this point is you get a link attached to your deal showing where the project went. You can do much, much better.
We’d like to see:
company info passed over (address, email, web address) people from the company attached to the deal added to Basecamp and to the project internal people from our company attached to the deal added automatically to the project additional people attached to the deal also added, especially if they are already in BasecampIt does probably require an intermediate screen confirming the addition of these people to the project but you already have an intermediate screen there anyway to ask about the name of the deal. You could put the intermediate screen to much better use.
I’m excited to see the Highrise to Basecamp deal function really add value when these improvements are made.
Alec Kinnear 26 Jul 11
Let’s try the above but with numbers instead of asterisks for list items. We’d like to see:
1. company info passed over (address, email, web address) 2. people from the company attached to the deal added to Basecamp and to the project 3. internal people from our company attached to the deal added automatically to the project 4. additional people attached to the deal also added, especially if they are already in Basecamp.
It does probably require an intermediate screen confirming the addition of these people to the project but you already have an intermediate screen there anyway to ask about the name of the deal. You could put the intermediate screen to much better use.
James Ridgeway 26 Jul 11
I like the Basecamp and Highrise solutions. I do however think it’s kind of hokey that I’d have to upgrade to the full suite in order to gain this function. I don’t use Backpack because I can’t relate it’s data to a project, case, deal or contact within Basecamp or Highrise. I’ve hoped you guys would make this happen but in a way where all solutions worked together seamlessly. Even Tada should have the ability to integrate at some level.
Tomas Prochazka 26 Jul 11
Great guys!
Simply and functional. Thanx!
Jon Cogan 26 Jul 11
Now all you need to do is buy Harvest!! Then we’re all set!!!!
Tom 26 Jul 11
Still struggling with file transfer between the components of the Suite. Really think this should be more transparent, if not automatic. Any files attached to a deal in Highrise are not moved (or copied) to the newly created project.
JF 26 Jul 11
Tom: We had a version mocked up with file transfers, but we pulled back on it for the initial version. We may revisit that later on if there’s strong demand.
Billie Gaura 26 Jul 11
YAY !!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks you guys!
Billie Gaura 26 Jul 11
Ummm… wait. Hold please. We don’t have the suite because it would cost more money. We’re at the $150 a month BC and $50 a month HR. I have to pay MORE to get the functionality? Is that right? : ((
Justin 27 Jul 11
Like it. Will be very useful. But how about allowing your Highrise and Basecamp To Do’s presenting in a single place?
360 E-commerce 27 Jul 11
We (from 360 E-commerce) love this new feature! Another step forward to a brilliant tool package!
Keep up the good work!
Brian Daly 27 Jul 11
Hi, this is a great feature but I’m not seeing the button to transfer a deal won to Basecamp. Am I missing something?
Anonymous Coward 27 Jul 11
Our company uses Highrise and Basecamp, and we don’t have this feature. No button shows up for us if we click ‘won’.
How can we get this to work for us?
Thanks – GREAT new feature that I personally asked for! :D
Tena
Tena Moore 27 Jul 11
Haha – didn’t mean to be anonymous!
Our company uses Highrise and Basecamp, and we don’t have this feature. No button shows up for us if we click ‘won’.
How can we get this to work for us?
Thanks – GREAT new feature that I personally asked for! :D
Tena
Katrina Corcoran 27 Jul 11
Like the commented above, this button does not show up when we mark a deal as won. What do I need to do to implement this? I have logged in and out of Basecamp and Highrise and it still doesn’t show up.
Also, does this feature allow us to associate a deal with an existing project in Basecamp? In case we need to monitor change requests? Thank you.
Willem de Wal 27 Jul 11
Very welcome indeed. However, I don’t see the point when my files are not transferred to the new Basecamp deal. Could you please fix this?
Brian 27 Jul 11
Awesome. We’ve been using the suite for about six months and my biggest complaint has been that the suite consists of four products that don’t integrate with each other very well, with the biggest pain being the inability to turn deals into projects without a lot of overhead. Smaller projects have just remained in email threads instead of going through the process.
I’m very happy to see this introduced and I look forward to testing it out soon.
Frank Milia 27 Jul 11
I would like to move the deal into Basecamp before it is marked won, because the majority of our collaboration on the project is prior to the job being won during the bidding process.
Thanks!
Gabriel Oyarzabal 28 Jul 11
Awesome, thank you guys!
LOUISE MAJOR 28 Jul 11
When will it be available – i have just set a ‘win’ up and no basecamp button anywhere to be seen??!?
JF 28 Jul 11
Louise: This feature is only available for people who’ve upgraded to the 37signals Suite.
Andrew C 29 Jul 11
Great idea and like to previous postwhere is the “Start basecamp project” button. its not where it should be on my HighRise!!
A
Alex 30 Jul 11
I’d love to be able to attach a note from highrise to basecamp and vice versa. Now i have to enter all information 2 times.
Joshua Smith - iOnline 31 Jul 11
Brilliant!
Ironically, we had just outlined the development of this feature ourselves, using APIs from both tools, but hadn’t made a start. You just saved me from budgeting a couple of weeks of work.
Thanks. Now to investigate the upgrade to Suite…
Pin Agency 31 Jul 11
Just what we needed , no more manually recreating the data from highrise. Good job 37 signals team . Saves my team time we can dedicate to the projects themselves.
Sam smith 01 Aug 11
Too little, too late, it seems insulting to add such a feature and not bring across ALL the elements of the Deal. Worse is the fact we are forced to upgrade to the suite for what should be a basic feature for those paying for BC and HR every month. :(
Bah 01 Aug 11
Why, why, why are half the people in this thread acting like this is a big deal? It saves … like 5 seconds when creating a new project.
Joshua Smith – you should try it out. Chances are what you envisioned creating an API tool for is much more involved that what they have provided.
Pin Agency – Yes, yes, you do have to recreate all the data from Highrise. Except for the title …
This discussion is closed.