We recently conducted a survey of our Backpack customers. We got some great feedback — including that 97% of our customers would recommend Backpack to a colleague, friend, or family member. Thank you!!

We also included some open ended questions and comment boxes. I recently finished reviewing every response and noticed some suggestions about things that Backpack already offers. I thought I’d pull out some of the more common suggestions and show you where you can find these features in Backpack.

SSL on Solo

A few people mentioned that they didn’t have SSL on their Solo Plan. The Solo plan does include SSL, but it’s possible that it’s turned off. To check, click the Settings link in the top right corner. Then you’ll see this option:

Difficult to upload multiple files (or a folder) at once

A good way to handle multiple file upload (or uploading an entire folder) is to zip or compress the files or folder into a single archive. Then you can upload that single file instead of trying to upload all the separate files separately. Both the Mac and PC have zip/archiving/compression tools that allow you to do this. On the Mac OS X 10.5, for example, you can select multiple files or a folder, right-click, and select “Compress items”. I believe 10.4 said “Archive items”.

Reminders on calendar items

Some people said we should have SMS reminders on calendar items like we do on Backpack Reminders. We do. There’s a checkbox when you create a new calendar item that says “Email/SMS me 30 minutes before.” If you check this you’ll get an email or SMS (or both) letting you know the calendar event is 30 minutes away.

Search across pages

Some asked for a way to search across pages. You can. Just enter your search term in the search box in the sidebar on any page and it will search all your Backpack pages.

I want to pay yearly

Paying yearly was a big request. People said it would save them on transaction costs and expense reporting. While we don’t have yearly-payments, you can make a deposit into your Backpack account and make a single lump sum charge. Then we’ll pull from this credit instead of charging you every month. We’ll let you know when your credit is almost up.

To make a lump sum payment, click the Account link (top right), then scroll down to the “Make a lump sum payment” section.

Grouping pages

A fair number of people asked about being able to group pages. As they create more pages they find the lack of organization makes it tough to find related pages.

Good news: You can group pages using tags. Read more about using tags to group your Backpack pages.

Page templates

A few people mentioned the lack of page templates. They “don’t want to have to re-do common pages all the time.” Good news: You can duplicate any Backpack page. Just go to a page, scroll down to the bottom, and click “Duplicate page.” Backpack will then make an exact copy of the page you were looking at.