It’s been five days since I posted my initial review of Highrise, that shiny new application by our friends at 37signals. I’ve been getting adjusted to my new process of managing contacts and have had to remind myself a few times that there is a brand new tool that aims to make my life a little easier.

Contact Form Integration

I haven’t heard about a Highrise API available yet, but I will definitely be looking into tighter integration once that is available.

Direct Submissions (not yet)

It seems that Highrise isn’t going to allow direct emails to be sent to it, they need to come from an existing contact in your account. For example, our contact form sends an email to our customer service mailing list. At one point, we had it connected to the Basecamp API to submit each new contact request as a new message in a designated project, but it didn’t really give me what I was looking for. Since each user in Highrise has a custom dropbox email address, I thought that I would try to link up the contact form to submit directly to Highrise.

I got the following response back from Highrise. ;-)

Hi Robby-

An email was sent to your Highrise dropbox from
john@cusackforpresident.com. This address does not
correspond to any address that you have recorded
for yourself in your Highrise account, and so the
email was discarded.

So, in the meantime, I’m following this process with new contact requests as well as the other people at PA who are responsible for responding to Contact Requests.

Contact Request Submission

So… let’s say that John Cusack (one of my favorite actors while growing up) is having a weird dream and wants to get a website built for the record store that he ran in High Fidelity.

{width=”320” height=”500”}

He fills out the form and submits it, which our application than stores and also sends over his contact information to our customer service email address.

A few minutes later…

Manually Review in Mail.app (and apply 2-minute rule)

Here I am in Mail.app and doing a double-take… “is that the real John Cusack?” (no, it’s just test data).

{width=”500” height=”347”}

I then ask myself the following questions…

• Can I answer this in less than 2 minutes?

-   If yes, respond immediately (forward to Highrise, if contact
    info will be needed again)
-   If no, forward to Highrise
```ruby
Okay, so I've decided to forward this contact to Highrise as I decided
to go ahead and speak with John over the phone, since he was kind enough
to leave his phone number.

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm using
[Act-On](http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html) for forwarding emails to
Highrise.

(back-tic h)

[![Mail.app with
Act-On](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/160/428327106_c7b592290e_o.jpg){width="409"
height="101"}](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/428327106/ "Photo Sharing")

...and off the email goes.

## View/Edit message/contact in Highrise

I'm now logged into Highrise and looking at my dashboard. As you can
see, John Cusack is now at the top of my dashboad and waiting for me to
decide if I want to do something with it.

[![Highrise
Dashboard](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/169/428327762_70f622ac22.jpg){width="500"
height="216"}](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/428327762/ "Photo Sharing")

## Schedule Follow Up tasks

As I mentioned, I spoke with John over the phone and promised him that
I'd send him a follow up email with a proposed date/time for a meeting
next week.

[![Adding task in
Highrise](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/151/428327248_f7aa7f4e33.jpg){width="500"
height="496"}](http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbyrussell/428327248/ "Photo Sharing")

...and that's one way that I'm now using Highrise to getting all my
contacts organized.

## Five Day Review

Well, after five days of using [Highrise](http://www.highrisehq.com/),
I'm still impressed with it. Our Administrative Assistant began using it
last Friday and is using it to schedule follow up tasks for me. This
definitely beats the old process of leaving post-it notes on my desk
with names and phone numbers. :-)

We also upgraded to a paying account and paid for **invoice #4**.... and
I plan to hit contact #200 later today within our account.

A few bugs:

-   Forwarding email from Thunderbird doesn't currently work (as of last
```text
Friday)
```bash
-   A few forwarded emails from Mail.app didn't work right (garbled...
```text
html emails perhaps?)

Also… it appears that 37signals has opened the doors to the public earlier today.

Have fun!

So, today I got what I’ll call a platinum ticket from one of our pals at 37signals for their upcoming new application, Highrise, which is what they’d call a “shared contact manager.” The rest of you can keep hoping that you’ll win a golden ticket this weekend. ;-)

For the past year and a half, I’ve been wanting to build some sort of contact and task management tool for organizing all of the contact requests that PLANET ARGON receives about our Design and Development and Rails Hosting services. If I go away for a week, I come back to a huge backlog of people who may be waiting a response from me. Having a tool to allow others at PA to see what is in my queue and in some cases, respond on my behalf… has been needed. When I first heard about Highrise long ago, I got excited and have tried several different tools and each of those tools has left me feeling uneasy. Perhaps I’ll post some reviews of the other tools one day.

First Impressions

The signup process looks familiar… :-)

{width=”446” height=”175”}

Look and Feel

Well, it definitely looks and feels like a 37signals application. There might have been a time when I thought that would be silly… but really, when you look at other product suites, consistency is extremely important to the user experience. While they are definitely going to attract people to Highrise who have never used any of their other products, I’d also expect a huge majority of their initial customers will be users of their other products. It’s obvious that Highrise was in response to a void in the market that people (likely customers) were asking for in other products like Basecamp.

Highrise has all the Ajaxy goodness that you’d expect in a brand new modern web application. Most of it seems very intuitive, but I found myself getting caught up on the extra tabs across the top of the screen. When new tabs appear, my natural response was to try to close them when I was finished looking at the page. Perhaps this is just a design decision that I’ll learn to really like. At the moment, I’m still not quite sure because I expect the tabs to change quite frequently.

{width=”500” height=”29”}

(few minutes later)

Actually… I wonder if the interface designers at 37signals did this to help their users avoid having several tabs open in their web browser. I use Safari for Basecamp and generally have 5-8 tabs open throughout the day for different projects that our team is working on because the Dashboard view doesn’t really give me a good feel for what is happening throughout the day on our various internal and client projects. I’ll try to pay attention to my usage habits to see if I’m opening less browser tabs in Highrise.

So far, this is the one thing that I’m not quite sure about (yet).

Highrise meets Act-On

Once I saw that you could forward emails to Highrise and it’d auto-magically create a contact and store it, I jumped for joy (not literally… but I got an evil grin). I have been using (more like heavily relying on) Mail Act-On for what seems a really long time. I’m constantly forwarding emails off to my colleagues to keep things from sitting stagnant for too long. So, guess what I did?

{width=”358” height=”102”}

This is working beautifully and allowed me to move about 20 contact requests to Highrise in just a few minutes.

With this new ability, I can remove that one project in Basecamp that I was using to collect contact request information. That information now has a proper home!

Manage your Peeps

{width=”267” height=”395”}

I’m taking more screenshots and going to continue putting more of our contacts into Highrise… so… consider this part one of a short series of posts.

To be continued…

After kicking myself all weekend for not heading to SXSW. was getting ready to head to sleep last night and saw a post by Michael Buffington announcing that Stikkit won an award for Best Technical Achievement.

Congrats to Rael, Michael, and the rest of the Stikkit team!

InformationWeek has a short story titled, Poor Communications, Unrealistic Scheduling Lead To IT Project Failure.

“Communications failures top the list of reasons IT projects fail, according to poll results from the Computing Technology Industry Association.



About 28% of 1,000 respondents identified poor communications as the main cause of project failure, according to CompTIA, which offers project management training.”

So, while we’re all spending so much of our time focused on improving our technical skills, are we also investing our time into becoming communication superstars?

If you look back at the following posts, you’ll see some links to some excellent books on this topic.

• [Project Enlightenment with

d3](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/09/27/project-enlightenment-with-d3)
```text
-   [The Technology of
```text
Dialogue](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/09/12/the-technology-of-dialogue)
```text
-   [Those that Tend the Store need
```text
Dialogue](http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2007/01/04/those-that-tend-the-store-need-dialogue)

As” mentioned a few weeks ago”:http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2007/02/20/seattle-in-late-march, I’ll be up in the Seattle area in a few weeks. I took the invitation to head to the 2007 Microsoft Technology Summit in Redmond, WA. When I received the invitation… my immediate response was, “Why me?”

Their response?

“The event is specifically for people other than Microsoft fanboys… they want to have a dialogue with influential members of the developer community outside of their comfort zone to see what we can learn from each other..”

Fair enough. Perhaps they’ll convince me to switch our entire team to Microsoft products… but I highly doubt my team would be cool with that. ;-)

It looks like Michael Koziarski (of Rails Core fame) will also be at the event. Supposedly, there will only be 50-60 people… so if you’re also going to be there, let me know.

I’m not sure what to expect yet from the event and they don’t have a web page dedicated to it. The most that I could find was a few blog posts from attendees of previous years. I plan to do some blogging during the event to share my experiences (good and bad).

s. thanks to those who invited me to have drinks/dinner while I’m staying in Bellevue. I’ll be responding to your emails in the next week. if you’re interested in meeting up, drop me a line.

It appears that Seth Godin is catching on to the concept of Dialogue.

Seth writes, “Some organizations are good at listening. Some are good at talking. A few are even good at both.”

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I listen to clients, employees, friends, and family. All of our relationships are a series of conversations. Sometimes we can have healthy dialogue, sometimes we just fall victim to debate. (see Dialogue vs Debate)

If you’re really interested in Dialogue, I’d encourage you to review the technology of Dialogue. and check out the Dialogue-Driven Development project and introduce yourself.

While reviewing some articles related to small business management, I came across the following post… titled, Note From Boss to Employees, by Michael Wade. As a young business owner, who only 16 months ago was working in his attic… to now trying to figure out how to run a company with over ten employees (and growing), posts like this remind me that we all have so much to learn. :-)

Here are a few that I appreciated…

“I may not have been given a huge amount of training before being named to a supervisory position. As a result, I’ve had to learn through trial and error. That’s not always bad. Many of my responsibilities can only be learned through practice.”

Yep… that’s me! The only difference is that I promoted myself instead of being promoted by someone else. I’m still not sure what I got myself into sometimes. ;-)

“I will make mistakes. Please give me the same understanding that you’d like me to give you when you blunder.”

This reminded me of a blog post from last year, titled, Avoiding the most common software development goofs, which points out that things like ignorance and stress are often to blame for mistakes in development. I feel like these are reasons for goofs in just about any environment, especially business. Let’s face it. We’re not perfect and we’re going to make a lot of mistakes. Once we’ve agreed on this, let’s take the next step and see what happens.

“If I do something dumb or am on the verge of doing so, please tell me. Don’t hint. Tell me.”

Perhaps this is a common problem for most small business owners. Are employees afraid to tell me that I’m doing something dumb?

“If either of us has a problem with the other’s performance, let’s talk about it.”

As they say, real friends will be honest with you about your faults. Not because they want to make you look bad, but because they care.

Each of the points that I have listed here are pointing to is… healthier Dialogue, which is always a challenge to accomplish… in any relationship… whether with clients, coworkers, bosses, or employees.

I’d like to add a few to this list.

• It’s easier to ask for forgiveness, than to ask for permission.
• I’m still trying to get the hang of this GTD stuff, so.. you might

remind me if I forgot something.
```text
-   Ask yourself on a regular basis, "Am I having fun?" If not, make
```text
time for some.

• Please make fun of the boss! :-)

“Showing up on time …with a smile on your face is almost always more important than what you actually say or do.” —Seth Godin

overhead here.

{width=”240” height=”160”}

…overheard on an internal forum…

“My my passion for nifty server tricks will blow peoples minds” —Daniel Johnson

Okay, this is a little overdue… but better late than never! ;-)

We’ve had several new people start with PLANET ARGON over the past few months. Some of them are blogging about their experience of working with Ruby on Rails and being a part of our team. I wanted to quickly introduce you to a few of them and their blogs, which I hope that you consider subscribing to.

Chris

For quite some time, we’ve been needing more design assistance, so late last year… we hired Chris Griffin, who moved here last year from Florida. He’s our new User Interface Designer and gets to work within the Rails environment everyday with the rest of us. It seems that Brian and Chris worked over the weekend to get his new blog up. Chris is self-proclaimed genius. I suggest that you keep an eye on his blog… because I’m sure it’s going to be a pretty active one. Chris joining our team marks a pivotal point in our teams evolution as we continue to place more emphasis in our Design and Development process on the User Experience.

• http://chriszgriffin.com/

Graeme

{width=”240” height=”160”}

Our newest hire is Graeme Nelson, who recently moved to Portland from Seattle. He just joined our Design and Development team and if you’ve been reading the Rails-related blogs, you might have seen his blog already. He’s been blogging a lot about using RSpec with Rails and other fun things. He’s been contracting with us since the start of the year and I’m really excited that he’s accepted a job offer and joined the team!

• http://blog.imperialdune.com/

Gary

{width=”240” height=”160”}

Last… but not least is Gary Blessington. I believe that I first offered Gary a job with PLANET ARGON about 2 1/2 years ago when we were still focused on PHP/PostgreSQL…. but PHP apparently wasn’t enough of a catalyst. Gary and I previously worked together at Imark Communications several years ago, when I first started doing web development. He was the senior developer on the team and was an important mentor during my early days of developing in a professional environment. Late last year, he hung up his .NET tool belt to become our Design and Development Director. He started blogging earlier this year and is sharing his experience of switching from .NET to Ruby on Rails.

• http://garyblessington.us/.

I’ll introduce the others as they start blogging and such. :-)

I’m going to be hanging out in Redmond, WA. late next month… why? That… I’ll explain at a later date. ;-)

What I can say is that I’ll be available on a few evenings if anybody is interested in meeting up to talk shop, which can include anything from d3, ruby on rails, bdd, agile interaction design. to BBC comedy shows. :-)

I’ll be flying up from Portland to Seattle on Saturday, March 24th. I’m going to try and stay downtown for that night… and then will be staying at Sheraton Bellevue until Tuesday night. So… Saturday-Monday nights are currently open.

I’m also planning to head to the monthly Seattle.rb meeting on Tuesday, March 27th.

If you’re interested in meeting up, drop me a line.

UPDATE If you’re taking the kinky aspect of BDD too serious. please don’t email me. ;-)

Recently, Seth Godin posted a short blog post, titled, Apologies, ranked, which points out several ways of apologizing. When you work in a service industry, it becomes very important to develop good apology skills. Let’s be honest for a moment. Not everything works out for the best in every customer experience. Sometimes it’s their fault and many times… it’s our fault.

In response to Seth’s post, Marc Chung has written up a similar post that adapts this to software bugs, titled, Seth on Fixing Bugs.

It’s worth a read and definitely relates to the communication issues that we keep talking about within the Dialogue-Driven Development community and how that can translate to a healthy testing process with BDD.

Thoughts?