Yesterday we announced multiuser support is coming to Backpack. Today we want to preview two more features: Messages and the Newsroom.
Messages
While we were building Backpack Multiuser we realized that something was missing. The “watercooler” feature where people could discuss stuff going on in the office, quick projects, make announcements ala a bulletin board, etc. So we built messages into the new Backpack.
Messages make Backpack a great hub for internal discussions and conversations that are usually passed around in mass emails. Toss the email mess and post in Backpack instead.
Newsroom
A big part of multiuser is knowing who did what when. Who made a new page? Who added something to the calendar? Who commented on a message? Knowing these things helps you discover new content and connects you with the other people who are part of the account.
Here’s what the Newsroom looks like:
You’ll see the latest messages appear at the top of the Newsroom. At the bottom of the Newsroom you’ll see the “Latest Activity” section which lists big picture activity in the account such as new pages, new calendar items, new messages/comments, etc.
We think you’ll love the Messages and Newsroom sections coming to Backpack soon. Note: Both of these features are only available on larger multiuser plans (they really aren’t useful on two or three-user accounts). More on this in a future post.
More soon
Over the next week or so we’ll be unveiling some of the other new features coming soon to Backpack. Stay tuned.
Tim
on 12 Feb 08Does anyone else now feel like Backpack will have too much.
With the announcement of these new features (which are great), the difference b/w Basecamp & Backpack is starting to blur.
Brent Sordyl
on 12 Feb 08I like the idea of a secluded ‘twitter’ type message board for a project. I had been considering using the Prologue wordpress theme.
Jim
on 12 Feb 08Cool. So Backpack is the new Basecamp with a better calendar.
Micah Calabrese
on 12 Feb 08Tim, While I’m sure these guys know what they’re doing in the “too much” area, I had that same feeling of apps starting to blur together. It’s almost like 37signals apps are moving more and more toward modular functionality held together by open ID and Active Resource.
Matt Carey
on 12 Feb 08I was reading this post and thinking our studio could really make use of these new features. We have been thinking we need a central store for ‘stuff’; notes, important information etc. A wiki seemed an option but I have been putting it off because of the hassle of setting up.
The new Backpack looks great until I read:
Huh!? Even though there are 3 of us being able to track what we have each changed will still be important.
Aaron B
on 12 Feb 08I think this is making a lot of sense. It would really fulfill the intranet type needs my company has.
Ryan
on 12 Feb 08Personally, I think these new changes are great, and I can very easily still realize when I need/want Backpack over Basecamp.
Part of me feels the Newsroom page is a bit too textual. I mean, I do realize that all the information is there, and it’s really not that hard to parse. This is specifically related to the “latest messages” section. Distinguishing the name, from the date, from the number of replies might be a little more difficult than it should be?
Maybe if the number of replies were floating to the right (with a potential subtle highlight? or a fading line to extend the path to the number of replies?), and the date was in the infamous “light gray” color, things would be a bit easier to read?
Of course, it’s hard to say without actually trying it out. And you guys pretty much come up with some of the best application designs I’ve ever seen, so there’s really no need to complain/suggest anything.
Again, love the new additions to Backpack.
Justin
on 12 Feb 08Unless you’re trying to find a reason to reward larger licenses with these features its a bad idea to not include them for smaller accounts. I’d like to cut down on my email just as much as the next guy, especially in small projects.
Tim
on 12 Feb 08With these cool new features, how would you easily distinguish Backpack from Basecamp in a single sentence?
Mateusz Drożdżyński
on 12 Feb 08I guess Backpack is undergoing a transition towards competing with Basecamp rather than being a complimentary product.
Up until now it’s been clear to me what was what – Backpack was for personal notes, Basecamp for project management.
I managed to blend Highrise into my workflow quite well even though it seems to be redundant in terms of features when compared to Basecamp, but I feel like these updates to Backpack are going to cause some confusion.
I’m glad Backpack is getting new features, it’s just that it’ll now take more time for a new customer to decide whether they want to use Backpack, Basecamp or Highrise.
Jon
on 12 Feb 08I would really like to have a “Newsroom” that covers all the activity across my 37signals apps. I can see updates on Highrise, Basecamp, Campfire, and even now Backpack Multiuser.
With all these sites to visit, it’s too hard to stay in the loop!
Micah
on 12 Feb 08Hmm. facebook newsfeed inspired?
Nathaniel
on 12 Feb 08I like how they are only included in the larger accounts, as I probably wouldn’t find them very useful while running a one-man show.
Cool beans nonetheless.
Max
on 12 Feb 08This is the first time I see so much negative reactions to an announcement of new features.
And I have to say, I felt a little bad myself when I read all what was going to be implemented. I do feel there is going to be some confusion.
When I read the post about the multiuser feature yesterday, I thought my company would be able to use it as a multiuser wiki. But now I KNOW they will put important messages there that must go into our basecamp projects, and otherwise.
JF
on 12 Feb 08With these cool new features, how would you easily distinguish Backpack from Basecamp in a single sentence?
Basecamp is your project management tool, Backpack is your company intranet.
Basecamp and Backpack are entirely different products for different purposes. We use both for very different things. Once you try Backpack Multiuser you’ll see how different they are. Stay tuned.
For starters, you wouldn’t want to manage a web site redesign project with your client using Backpack. And you wouldn’t want to keep a quick list of server IP addresses in Basecamp. Of course you could do these things, but they’d be out of place and a lot more difficult than the proper alternative.
Backpack has a single message board. Basecamp has message boards and multiple categories for each project. You can’t talk about something in Backpack without everyone seeing it. In Basecamp the only people who can see something are people with access to a project. You certainly wouldn’t want clients in your Backpack account.
Basecamp has responsibilities—you can assign to-dos and milestones to people. Things that aren’t done in Basecamp will be marked late. Backpack to-dos don’t have responsibilities or time tracking and nothing is ever “late” in Backpack.
These may seem like small points, but they’re very large differences when it comes to how you use the two products. The workflow is entirely different. The benefits are entirely different. The outcomes are entirely different. The way you store information and attach it to things (projects vs. pages) is entirely different.
So try both and see which one fits best for you. Or do like many people do, and use both for different things.
Ricky Irvine
on 12 Feb 08It reminds me of the Adobe CS apps. They’re all so similar they begin to blur together. They have their individual purposes and strengths, but you could almost use just one for everything (depending on a multitude of variables). I’ll be glad for the day when 37signal apps begin to merge a bit more, or else become more distinguishable from one another. Highrise and Basecamp really should be one app.
Anonymous Coward
on 12 Feb 08It reminds me of the Adobe CS apps. They’re all so similar they begin to blur together.
Uh what? Photoshop is about pixels. Illustrator is about vectors. Indesign is about multi-page page layout. Completely different things when you are using them how they are intended.
Sure you can use a rock to nail a nail, but a hammer is the proper tool.
notreadbyhumans
on 12 Feb 08I disagree that Basecamp and Highrise should be unified, but I do think that it should be possible to pick and choose the functionality from the three apps/concepts to make a single app that meets your particular needs (with storage by the GB).
One of my big frustrations with Backpack has been its inability to scale effectively to multiple users and I feel that this move is a good one. I have found it to be extremely useful as a personal information manager and see no reason why this shouldn’t scale to quite large groups.
Josh Walsh
on 12 Feb 08Basecamp and Backpack appear (to me at least) to be on a converging path. The lines between the two are becoming blurred.
Maintaining a single client in 3 apps is becoming more of a headache. It’s easier to put data in the wrong app and keep client maintenance centralized. Which seems anti-37S philosophy.
Beautiful UI though….
Richard Allum
on 12 Feb 08The new features look excellent. Like others, when I saw this:
Both of these features are only available on larger multiuser plans (they really aren’t useful on two or three-user accounts).
I was a bit disappointed as I can also see the benefit for our small company and also a family site I have. The details behind this message have not been released yet but please consider making them available for all paying plans.
JF
on 12 Feb 08I was a bit disappointed as I can also see the benefit for our small company and also a family site I have. The details behind this message have not been released yet but please consider making them available for all paying plans.
There’s very little value in having a message board for two people. Email is perfect for that. Message boards work when they replace mass emails and extended discussions with 4, 5, 6, 10+ people. That’s when they shine.
So what happens is you have this message board that takes up space which you won’t use. And then it’s just a nuisance. We’ve learned a lot about this sort of thing over the past 4 years. Some things work better for bigger groups, some work better for smaller groups. Exposing stuff that works for big groups to small groups just gets in the way.
If you feel the message boards are valuable for you and one or two other people you can always upgrade to the next plan that has messages. It’s just a value decision you can make. I suspect you won’t find it valuable enough for 2-3 people. And you’d wish that the screen real estate wasn’t taken up by something you weren’t using.
Ben Lilley
on 12 Feb 08I’m too going to join in and say that I think it’s strange that the smaller accounts can’t have multiple users. I understand your reasoning with 2 users but as soon as you have 3 or more I can see these features being valuable.
JF
on 12 Feb 08I’m too going to join in and say that I think it’s strange that the smaller accounts can’t have multiple users.
All accounts have multiple users. Different plans have a different number of users. We’re just previewing a few things here. These posts aren’t mean to have all the answers to all the questions and lay out everything in detail. They are just high level previews to give people a general feel for what we have planned.
Stay tuned for more detail as time goes on. Thanks for your patience.
Paul Lloyd
on 12 Feb 08These updates look great. I only have one gripe/question – when will it be possible to use the same colour palettes across all your different services? I have a Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack (linked together with the excellent Open Bar), and although I can customise my Basecamp colours, the colour presets available in Highrise and Backpack are totally different – would be nice if the same choices were offered across the board.
Tiny I know, but it surprised me to find this to be the case.
Tony
on 12 Feb 08These are awesome upgrades – scratching the exact itch I have been having as I am a leading a small company with a couple people, but with Basecamp being too much to manage to be usable as we collaborate.
Can’t wait!
Neil Kelty
on 13 Feb 08Paul:
I’m fairly certain this is possible! I’m currently doing it.
Derick
on 13 Feb 08Will the Newsroom include notification of items added by e-mail? I have several mail rules set up to forward incoming e-mail to particular backpack pages, & it would be nice if the Newsroom could record arrival of e-mail as well as changes made by users.
JB
on 13 Feb 08An admittedly trivial request: can you guy sort out the colour schemes for BP?
In my opinion any option except red, black and maybe grey looks utterly gauche.
All the other choices are too saturated and primary.
Anyone agree with me on this?
Kris Black
on 13 Feb 08I can’t believe it! I dreamed of this but never thought it would happen. I always thought it was out of the scope of what backpack is for. AWESOME! Here’s to change and a hell of a development team. Thanks 37signals.
Doug
on 13 Feb 08@Kris
It is “out of the scope” for backpack and is why so many people are not looking forward to the features. It’s creating too much product confusion.
Kevin MIlden
on 13 Feb 08I like the ideas. We have already been sharing one backpack account to share the best web calendar we’ve ever seen. We have turned it into a company wide knowledge center made up of pages.
I was just talking about the private Twitter that isn’t real-time like campfire. Glad you built it so we didn’t have to.
We keep our todos, time logs, client messages and files in basecamp. We don’t use the milestones. We don’t share basecamp with clients. I have never been successful getting customers to use it. They stick to email and telephone.
We use Highrise to track leads, estimate development and contact info. Sometimes internal legal, accounting, and corporate documents and issues. The cases make that stuff easy to aggregate. It needs to be faster to case email. Too many clicks.
Campfire is the most important application. It is as important to our company as Gmail. It is the office, the place, where it all goes down. We use it everyday and every night. It is the best group chat product we’ve used. It is their most innovative yet overlooked product ever.
I’m a little confused on where to put a todo these days. As most people I would like to see backpack’s calendar in each basecamp project. I like that there isn’t a ridged rule set to how to use each product. We think we are using them “right” and ignore the features we don’t need.
Backpack becoming our multi-user company wiki is a good idea. It’s something we noticed we are already using it for. Adding quick status messages is like Twitter is a good idea. We have a use for that when we want to see where people are when they are not in Campfire.
I am looking forward to testing it in the field.
Richard Allum
on 13 Feb 08JF: “If you feel the message boards are valuable for you and one or two other people you can always upgrade to the next plan that has messages.”
I agree and am looking forward to seeing how the various options shape up. It was only after I posted that I looked at the account screen and realised that I can have the top plan for $14 per month which is excellent value. Are you going to change these at all? If I have the $14 plan will I get all the features automatically?
The intranet ideas suggested by other users are very good – we currently use a project in Basecamp which is OK but this will be much better.
David, biologeek
on 13 Feb 08The link ‘use OpenID’ in the Backpack sign up page is broken (it raises a js error).
Stephen
on 13 Feb 08I too am worried about this feature. I can see conversations about the same thing happening in two apps, and I can see messages being missed as staff are unsure where the canonical discussion is being held.
NobodyYouKnow
on 13 Feb 08I for one am really looking forward to this. I don’t use basecamp so I’m not concerned with “blurred lines.”
How I use backpack: I run a few small companies and use it as the central hub of communication between me and my assistant. My calendar is on there, both of us can make live changes and see them instantly. Same with next actions, travel information, meeting notes, everything. I practically live in backpack, and my assistant does, too. We both login as the same user.
I will be using newsroom even though there’s only two of us for this reason:
I only have one email account that I check. My assistant, my wife, my business partner, and companies’ VP are the only ones who know the personal address. I have 5 or 6 other addresses and they all go to my assistant. I get one email each morning reviewing all the email from the day before so I can act on them. (The other people know to only use my private email for messages they don’t want my assistant to see.)
Email is a distractor, almost everyone agrees with that by now. I have a rule that no “chatter” goes on by email, only items that need immediate action. I don’t want to be sitting in an important meeting and have my email “ding” and distract me unless its very important. The newsroom will be the place for chatter that I can check at my convenience. Things I need to know and act on but on my time, not the time of the person sending the email.
And if you’re wondering… getting only one email a day has just about changed my life. I am much more focused, my free time (like right now) is enjoyable and not garbled with “work” email, and in the evening my wife and kids actually get all of my attention, it’s not being grabbed away every 10 minutes by email alerts that you always wonder “is that an emergency?” about. If you can pull it off, I highly recommend it.
JF
on 13 Feb 08It was only after I posted that I looked at the account screen and realised that I can have the top plan for $14 per month which is excellent value. Are you going to change these at all? If I have the $14 plan will I get all the features automatically?
Pricing will be changing. The current prices are for Backpack as is—a single user product. Look to Highrise pricing as a better example of the new Backpack pricing when the new Backpack launches.
We have a transition plan for existing paying customers. More info on this later. I can’t discuss pricing further until we announce the new pricing.
ML
on 13 Feb 08Thanks for all the comments everyone. There’s really no need to be confused about the products. If you’re happy with Basecamp, you will continue to be happy with Basecamp. We’re just beefing up Backpack. They will still be way different products. And if you’re super excited for messages/Newsroom but you’re only two people, you can sign up for a plan that includes these features. There’s no minimum number of users for any plan. Stay tuned for more details.
Tim
on 13 Feb 08Ouch. The difference in pricing between Highrise & Backpack is 10 fold
Baeck
on 13 Feb 08Right you are, Tim. That comment has me worried that a tool I felt was geared more towards personal users is now going to take a business turn that will price the personal users completely out of the market (especially if they want to retain their current level of features (# of pages, SSL, etc.).
Obviously, I’ll have to wait to see what they have in store for us before I’ll start freaking out, though! ;-)
Scott Wintheiser
on 13 Feb 08Any idea on when (roughly) the new features will be ready? A week? A Month? Three Months?
We’re already using backpack as a intranet/wiki by sharing pages across seven different backpacks (kind of a pain). We are also using the calendar as our company wide schedule. Sharing this is also a pain since everyone but me can only see it in iCal.
I’m really excited about these new features! Once again, I think you’ve managed to make a good product great.
DHH
on 13 Feb 08Tim, as Jason said we’ll be making sure that people on the current plans are taking care of. But the pricing for using a single Backpack in a 10-person company is not going to be the same as it was when Backpack was only a single-user story.
Ches
on 13 Feb 08Personally I think the new features sounds great, and without using it yet I feel like the distinction should be pretty clear between Backpack and Basecamp.
My thoughts reading the thread prior to hitting JF’s response were exactly what he summed up: Basecamp for project management, Backpack for intranet. Simply put, if it relates to a specific project, it probably belongs in Basecamp. I think it should be pretty clear in practice.
We currently use a few projects in Basecamp for IT, Design and Development, Client Dev, etc. where we store Writeboards for policies and other sorts of things similar to the examples in the earlier multiuser post. This is a bit clumsy, and it would tie up valuable active projects if we didn’t already need an unlimited account. Multiuser Backpack looks like it could offer an ideal solution.
I have a personal Backpack account with little shared information. If the presence of the multiuser features is minimal in the bottom-tier accounts, I doubt I’ll feel that it clutters the interface or gets in the way of how I currently use that Backpack.
Still, as some others have expressed, I do hope that features like the Newsroom are available to accounts with a small number of users, without too much mostly needless expense in upgrading. For one thing, I may not think to check Backpack as frequently for a smaller team or ad hoc project, so subscribing to a feed for that Newsroom could help tremendously in staying abreast of developments.
Also, even in small teams, I often like message boards as a central place to track and refer back to discussions, and honestly, to hold people responsible for information. Emails are too easily lost in the fray, or excuses are made about forgetting to CC the right person, or whatever. I do understand the points about usability, though, and trust what 37s has learned in practice about only exposing features where they’re needed.
Ricky Irvine
on 13 Feb 08Exactly. A lot of people use Illustrator for page layout. We can draw in InDesign. I could use Backpack for project management. I could use Basecamp to collect and store data.
Paul Smith
on 13 Feb 08@Ricky So true! I’ve used Photoshop for things that InDesign could have done and maybe should have done!
Anonymous Coward
on 14 Feb 08I’ve used Photoshop for things that InDesign could have done and maybe should have done!
...and sometimes I’ve used the phone when an email would do. Other times I should have written a letter instead of sending a fax. Who cares!
I don’t know why people feel like software needs to be absolute. Sometimes you use this, sometimes you use that, sometimes you use this for that when you’d normally use that for this. It doesn’t matter.
As long as the task gets done it doesn’t matter what you use to do it.
Relax everyone.
Volkher Hofmann
on 14 Feb 08“There’s very little value in having a message board for two people. Email is perfect for that. Message boards work when they replace mass emails and extended discussions with 4, 5, 6, 10+ people. That’s when they shine.”
Err, no.
I get where you are coming from but I think you should be aware by now of the fact that your customers are often not sticking to what you thought they might be doing with your software and have instead gotten quite creative with it. To me it sounds a bit like you can’t really envision what people are really capable of doing with Backpack.
Instead of only companies using your application, you have couples coordinating long-distance relationships via Backpack, their future trips together or whatever. You have bloggers coordinating joint posts via Backpack, etc., etc. etc.
I think you should be a bit more open-minded in that regard and actually accept that these new functions could be more than useful even for just two people using Backpack. The way I’m using my accounts I KNOW I need (read: want) those new features …. because they benefit MY way of using the product.
Hope I was able to put across what I meant. I love Backpack and hope you might reconsider the implementation of the new features for us private users, couples or very small teams of two, three people and make them available to all possible scenarios …
Let us be creative!
And, of course, thanks for making my life so much easier by providing me with the one single tool I find useful, Backpack (plus Highrise). Hell, it’s the only thing I’ve ever paid for where I haven’t regretted having paid. Actually, I’d be more than happy by now to pay more. It’s become virtually indispensable to me.
Cheers!
This discussion is closed.