Hello,

I’m considering abandoning Daylite entirely for 37 Signals products. I signed up for a Plus account in Basecamp yesterday and will sign up for Highrise if they integrate well.

Can anyone look at my situation and advise the best way to think of 37signals products?

I’m a recording & mixing engineer and so I make record albums for bands. Each band has about 3-6 members. Most members are in several different bands. Bands make records, and solo artists make records. In making a record I also assign some work to freelancers: string arrangers, session musicians, assistants, etc.

In Daylite a person (or freelancer) is a Contact and a band is an Organization and an album is a Project. I’m able to link any number of contacts to any number of different bands and give them a unique roles in each band (singer, guitarist…)

How does this translate to 37signals way of working? How would You set up my recording business in Basecamp to work well for the long term? Do I need Highrise?

Lastly, in general I use calendars on computers. I’m used to making a task, goal, todo list or whatever and putting it in Google Calendar which then syncs everywhere. It seems Basecamp and its programmers don’t use calendars? How do you guys schedule a complicated day with all these todos and project goals? Computer calendar or paper & pencil?

thanks,
Bill Moriarty

If your projects are related to external people you have to perform actions on them – Use Highrise. Disadvantage : no extranet ie no interaction with those people, no milestones.
If your projects are based around a collaborative team and some input from clients, as in developing a software, an identity kit etc. – use Basecamp. Disadvantages : no CRM whatsoever, no trail log of external communication, todo lists are unrelated to people.

Integration between the two products is very minimal!

If you are ok with using both products, pre-sales, sales and CRM should be done on Highrise through contacts and cases. Once you signed to do a recording you could create a project in Basecamp and open it for your artists, engineers, musicians, collaborators, suppliers etc. so that they can contribute.

If you need to use only one product, it will mostly depend on the number of your contacts and how important your sale process is. Fewer contacts, easy sale process -> Basecamp.
Huge number of contacts, busy pre-sale operation -> Highrise and keep tracks of projects there you can synch with clients through email because of no extranet. You can store files, contracts, recordings etc.

Hope this help, I’m sure there are more capable Basecamp and Highrise people around here that could help you better.