Yay! Ever since reading the @37signals notice about putting Highrise for sale, I was worried about it. Welcome @natekontny & subsidiary team

— cchen7 (@cchen7) August 19, 2014

I was excited to hear that Highrise would become a subsidiary of 37Signals/Basecamp rather than being sold off to a big company like Salesforce or Microsoft. I’ve been using the 37Signals suite (including classic Basecamp and Campfire) for years now. I do also use the new Basecamp and have really enjoyed the modern feel & features of it. I’m glad that Highrise will now get some TLC as it sorely needs an update.

So why have I remained with Highrise then? It is just because of laziness and unwilling to deal with the hassle of exporting to a new CRM system? Nope. It’s because Highrise covers all my team’s basic needs and does it well still. Even though we have an office, almost everyone works remotely. It’s about being able to share key information with easy access without having to worry about the airport wifi being strong enough to support a VPN connection to an internal CRM server.

With that in mind, here are my top 5 suggestions for Nathan et al:

1. A better search: First thing a new team members asks me during training is why does Highrise have 2 search boxes and the inevitable comparison to Google’s 1 box. While my standard reply is that don’t we all wish we could be like Google, it would be great to be able to search across contacts, companies, notes, tags, etc. all in one place.
2. Cross category tags: Currently only contacts can be tagged. This leaves cases and deals on their own, even though they can be associated with a contact. We’ve found tags useful for tracking marketing campaigns and it would be great to associate the resulting sale with the marketing campaign.
3. Drag & Drop upload: ’nuff said
4. File preview: Definitely a time saver to have an in-browser preview of the file (such as PDFs, Word docs) to see if it’s the correct one to download.
5. Mobile app: Would be double plus good if it had a business card scanner feature.

Can’t wait to see what the new Highrise will be like!

File under “why didn’t I think of this” — iron- and sew-on QR code patches. The patches (and stickers) are available from a company called stkr.it. In addition to creating the QR code, they’ll also host an audio or video file forever.

These fabric patches would be very useful on the bags & clothing of people who cannot tell others about themselves. Scenarios range from lost toddlers to dementia patients to autistic wanderers. The police or whoever found the lost person could then scan the patch and see a video or hear an audio of the emergency contact details. It would be useful to also include a description of the lost person or show the person in the video for confirmation.

Granted the information isn’t as easily accessible as an ID bracelet, but the option to include more detailed information is a valuable one.