Follow-up on Highrise: Emailing Notes--Where Have You Been All My Life?

Highrise has this feature where every account is given a unique "drop box" email address. Simply include this address in the Cc or Bcc fields and the email text is sent to the appropriate contact as a new note. It then shows up as a mail icon in the contact's overview.

I mentioned in yesterday's post about Highrise that I'd had some exposure to evaluating enterprise CRM systems. When I was investigating various options and interviewed a number of existing users and their managers about the adoption rate of whatever system they had installed, one issue kept coming up over and over again: integration with Outlook.

"My people just live inside of Outlook. They already have to have one or two other windows up for silo systems that allow them to view or perform transactions, when we gave them another CRM window--they just didn't use it."

Even if you try to use Outlook Contacts to keep notes on and set flags for every significant contact you have with a person, it was always double entry: send the email, log that you sent it in their contact notes pane. Even if you use the MS CRM product you still have to toggle the "save this email" off and on. So once again, 37Signals has embraced constraints and found a simple solution where others wrap lots and lots of features and code around it. And I haven't even tried emailing tasks yet...

Now as a caveat I will say this feature is not "perfect." On my first attempt it missed the body of the email and only included text from my auto signature down. After consulting the Help screens I realized the feature was optimized for Plain Text emails (and I insist on using HTML). I switched the format to Plain Text, forwarded it to my drop box, and that did work perfectly.