First let me say, the new backpack is great, and I’m happy with the changes we see.

That having been said, Backpack is the most “family-oriented” of the various 37signals tools. The need for people to be able to collaborate more closely is, well, vital. Per-page sharing may be appropriate between siblings or friends, but for a couple it’s an aggravating speed bump.

There has to be some way to allow one account to support multiple users or multiple accounts to pool their resources. In an age with SANs on every street corner, flexible provisioning of pages/space between people willing to either share an account or merge seperate ones would be nice.

Agreed. My SO and I are using Backpack to plan our wedding and we ended up creating a new account for it, despite each of us already having our own, because we needed to both have full control over the calendar, reminders, and all pages. The e-mail address we use for the reminders is an alias to both of us and we share a single username/password for the account.

If I remember correctly, it was mentioned in the old forums that some sort of multi-user functionality was coming. I was hoping to see it in this update.

+1
Wife and I would like to share calender and reminders but sharing a login is just sloppy.

What’s so sloppy about sharing a login? My wife and I use Backpack that way, and have no complaints. I’m curious to see what issues you are running into.

Come to think of it, the only issue that we’ve run into is knowing when an item that the other person created has been added to Backpack (i.e. calendar event, todo list item, etc). But I think a Dashboard section would take care of this.

Sounds interesting but complicated to implement. Could this be handled by having reminders/calendars attached to a shared page? They might show up on all sharing users reminders and events?

In my specific case, no, because we both need to be able to add pages as needed.

What I would really like to see is something like the Highrise system for Backpack: multiple users, permissions, etc. Basecamp is too project-oriented for this type of shared family use, while Backpack is nearly perfect.

I’d consider paying the $10 for both my wife and I if we could have a family style account rather than two separate accounts. However, I really won’t pay $10/month for two different accounts, and I won’t pay $5/month for the single account because of non-integrated accounts.

Sharing a login would work for us, however, that’s against policy, so while we could ignore it, we won’t…

Sharing a single login is not permitted by the Terms of Service. We’ve run into situations where someone shared a login and then someone else cancelled their account. Your login is yours and yours alone. It should not be shared with anyone else—even a spouse or close friend. Backpack is currently a single-user product. If you need to share pages please use the sharing feature. Thanks.

That doesn’t make sense; basecamp and highrise have single-account-owners with multiple user accounts. Your response is no doubt that these are business tools.

I’m sure there are business owners who might view backpack as the perfect tool for them. Create a Max plan, $25 per month/3000 pages/10 GB/multiple users allowed. Alternatively, if you want to charge by user, improve page sharing, allow accounts to pull their page allocations, and do it that way.

A third option is to fold backpack into one of your other products, but I’d imagine that’s even more unlikely.

I realise 37signals doesn’t feel feature requests are a useful source of input for the future direction of its products (in general), but this is really a rather important issue.

I’ve spent $225 so far on backpack; my monthly 37 signals bill is approaching $87/mo, and I’m asking to pay more.

At some point, it will be cheaper to commission a clone than pay $1044 a year without having any efficacy about the evolution of these tools.

I realise 37signals doesn’t feel feature requests are a useful source of input for the future direction of its products (in general), but this is really a rather important issue.

That is a rather unfair statement to make. Although I have not tracked every post made by the 37signals folks, I do believe that they listen to all the feature requests and other input regarding their products. However, the direction they take with their products is entirely up to them.

This feature may be something that you feel strongly about and, indeed, it sounds like a feature that would be an effective solution for your problem. For other people, however, it might simply be yet another highly irrelevant feature.

I actually wasn’t intending to be insulting; I’m under the impression that they take the view that often customers don’t know what makes for a good product. Many very successful companies, that create great products and/or provide great services take this view; see Apple and their dislike of focus groups.

I fully concede that sometimes 37signals does take feature requests into account; my impression is that they generally view these sorts of submissions with skepticism. This hasn’t stopped me from posting suggestions, on the off chance that one of my wishes strikes them as a good idea.

Most of the time, there are work arounds. With Campfire’s lack of an API, and BP’s lack of multiple accounts, it’s virtually impossible to work around. BC/HR’s APIs provide the hope that if I really dislike a certain behaviour (or lack thereof) I can make my own workaround…

-RS

It’s lost in the wreckage of the old forum, but I’m 99% sure they did say at one point that Backpack 3 (or an unnamed future version) would support multiple users. Presumably they will never talk about future versions again until a day or two before launch, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see this feature at some point.

I know this is an old thread, but I have to add my plea for multiple users in BackPack.

Basecamp is a bit too structured and inflexible for the small projects my team is doing. The ability to put mulitple kinds of things in BackPack and the ease of reordering them is just perfect. But we can’t use it because we need multiple users!

I’m not sure what we’re going to do. Our current hodgepodge of tools isn’t working, but I don’t see any good alternatives out there so we’re just kind of stuck.

Auuugh.

I also just noticed this old thread, and would like to add a “+1” to the mix. The official “Backpack is currently a single-user product.” is, to me, completely insufficient. Obviously, people want, and would find great value in a simple multi-user system. Backpack has the potential to be a really GREAT collaborative tool. Why clamp down so hard? The permissions system in Highrise is fantastic. Simple, effective, and flexible. WHY is Backpack a one-person-only offering? Just doesn’t make sense. Why not make it just like Highrise: 1 user on the free plan, 3 (or even 2) users on the first paid plan, and on up…

Hoping the rumors of multi-users in Backpack “X” are true.

It is already multi-user as long as both users have an account and share pages etc.

My wife and I have an account each and share the pages/calendars that we need to.