Rooftop – An Android app for Highrise CRM
Today Staircase3 is happy to announce the launch of Rooftop, a fully featured app for using Highrise from your android phone/device.
Highrise, by 37 Signals, is an excellent CRM tool targeted to individuals, and small business/groups to help them keep track of leads, deals & contacts. Rooftop allows you to access and edit all of your Highrise contacts and data on the go and features offline syncing for your contacts.
Features
Dashboard - Easily view all your account activity in one stream using the dashboard view.
Tasks - Add new tasks, view upcoming, completed and assigned tasks, and mark them as completed.
Contacts - Browse your Highrise contacts list and view contact details. Full offline access built in!
Cases - Create new cases, view existing cases, and add notes and comments.
Deals - Create and view deals, and easily mark them as won, lost or pending.
Notes/Comments – Add new notes and comments to any deal, contact, case, or task, and view their full comment history.
Rooftop is available now for $9.99 in the android market. If you are on an android device right now, you can click this link or scan the QR code on the left.
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Way cool — I’ve been waiting for a solid highrise / droid sync tool, so I’m very excited! It took a couple minutes to download everything fr highrise onto droid, and basically I have all my data. This is awesome, nice piece of work!
Couple questions:
I have all my contacts on droid now synced w/ Google Contacts, which I really dislike but don’t want to delete until I know Rooftop is working. So:
1. Contacts: integrated into native droid contact app, or separate list? If integrate (way better, if it works): do you merge the contact info w/ what’s already there? So, if I change someone a bit in highrise, I should see that in droid contacts? So far, that’s not happening — I see the highrise contacts in the Rooftop app contacts list, but the changes I made on highrise side do not show up in the droid native contacts app. Ultimately, I want to disconnect fr Google Contacts, lose those contacts and just have my highrise contacts show up on droid. Am I being clear?
2. When I go into Rooftop on droid and click contacts (Rooftop contacts, not native droid contact app icon), it re-searches highrise each time I click anything. I have ~3,800 contacts, so that takes a while, 20-30 seconds to refresh on each separate click. I want to just look at the local copy of the info and only manually resync w/ highrise from time to time, not check highrise every time I check a contact. How?
3. Same for other (non-contact) data: is there a way to store info other than basic contact info on droid for offline access, i.e. not have to re-search the whole database in highrise every time I want to check anything? The issue is the same: speed. even at home on wifi connection, good speed, and I only have a couple deals and a couple cases set up in highrise with almost no data associated with them, and rooftop takes same ~20-30 sec or so to return info w/ every click. That’s obviously not workable for any kind of routine access. What should I be doing?
I’m sure I’ll have other questions, but that’s my start. Thanks, great job — very cool so far.
@Alex
1. Separate list. We’re considering syncing with the native contacts, but not every user wants to put business contacts in with everyone else on your phone.
2. The offline syncing we have now loads everything into a file on your phone that Rooftop can read from. Because of the size of some people’s contacts list it can take a while to create that file and read from it, so there can be some delay when reading offline.
To manage large contacts lists better this is what we are planning: if Rooftop detects a large number of contacts offline syncing will be disabled and just portions of the contacts list will be brought back at a time (so you can scroll the list, but it will pause to load). You will still be able to search for any contact and from there view details and history, but only while online.
3. We are considering adding offline syncing for further features (Cases, Deals, Dashboard). For some reason it can be quite slow to communicate with Highrise from phones (try logging in using your native browser).r
Alex, if you are looking for a simple way to add your Highrise contacts to your phone’s database so that the name will shop up as caller ID here is a simple way:
1. Log into your Highrise account.
2. Go to this url: https://XXXXXXXXXX.highrisehq.com/people.vcf (substituting in for your organization’s name in place of XXXXXXXXXX)
3. This will give you a Vcard file to download that contains all your Highrise contacts. Go to your gmail account and select ‘contacts’. Hit ‘Import’ in the top right and then browse to the Vcard file you just downloaded and submit. Your android phone should then synch automatically with these contacts.
Its just a quick fix, but it might be of use to many people….
James & Brendan — Thanks, useful ideas, both w/ limits for me.
James:
1. Native contacts: Droid now integrates contacts it finds fr Google Contacts, Facebook, contacts, etc. The contact info is merged. That would be ideal. For me, I would disconnect Google Contacts and only use HR via Rooftop for most contacts, but other users might want to merge from other sources if needed. Having separate list in separate App is on Droid ok, if everything else works. But it duplicates a lot of functions that Droid does already. what Droid doesn’t do is to grab contacts and other info fr HR, and if RT could simply solve that, it would be fantastic. Let Droid manage search, let Droid display contact info, etc. Just get the data there fr HR, that’s the missing link.
2. Offline syncing: yes, it seems I do have a local copy, b/c I can access it while disconnected fr web. Still, it takes the same 23-30 seconds each time I load the list. That’s really not workable for routine use.
New issues I’m seeing:
Incomplete data:
I only have A-Co in my Rooftop contacts = couple 100 on Droid out of 3800 loaded into HR. So I can’t in fact see most of my contacts at all. And this shorter list is the one that takes 25-30 secs to load each time. That’s not really workable for me — I pick up phone, go to dial call, and can’t do anything for 1/2 minute.
My RT contacts don’t have email domains — I get the portion of the email address in front of the @domain, but the @domain portion does not appear. e.g. for john@company.com, RT only provides “john”. Therefore, I can’t use RT contacts for emailing. This is mission critical. Just re-checked HR and verified that the data is all there, it’s just not making it fr HR on Droid via RT. Any ideas?
Search:
Search by Name: I can only search for Last name, that does work quickly and appears to be accurate, that’s what I want for all search, it’s really good. But: RT doesn’t return First names that fit the search criteria. E.g. search for “Will” and I get Joe Willson, but not Will Jones. Need to be able to search on any part of name.
Search by Company: does not work, returns no results at all for anyone.
Search by Title works fine.
I don’t really want a separate search function anyway, I prefer to use Droid’s build in search. But I can’t use the native Droid search function, none of the RT contacts show up that way — if they were integrated into Droid Contacts, presumably Droid’s onboard search would work, avoiding the issues noted above w/ the RT search function.
I’ll try logging in fr native browser — obviously that’s not workable for routine contact lookup for phone, email, txt msging, but for other HR functions. Hope you guys can find a way to get that worked out w/in RT.
Brendan — Yes, the vcf approach works as far as it goes, so long as I’m willing to manually track new / changed contacts and constantly repost the vcf to Droid. That’s doable, but misses the elegance of RT, which I hoped would allow me to manage contacts in HR and know that they’ll just show up on Droid. Might work for those whose contacts don’t change much, but I have maybe a dozen or so every week that are new or changed, sometimes more, it’s just always moving, and I need a tool that doesn’t require me to be careful about posting in one place and remembering to post in the other too.
The other BIG problem w/ gmail is that once you send data to them, they take about a day to post it. So, I’m leaving the office, I upload a bunch of new contacts to gmail, and I hit the road…but nothing shows up on Droid for a whole day. That’s not a HR problem, it’s just a routine “feature” of gmail / google apps, one of the many reasons I’m hoping HR can talk to Droid directly w/out using Google, that’s the attraction of RT.
So: I don’t mind paying for the app once some of these kinks are worked out, I’m very excited that you’ve gotten this far and hope you see my comments as coming from a somewhat frustrated user w/ high hopes and reasonable needs, and RT isn’t giving me what I need in this first iteration, I can’t really use the app in it’s current form. So, should I get a refund and come back in a couple months after you’ve done a little more? Or do you think you have quick fixes for most of these issues?
Thanks very much for your replies so far, and any further words of wisdom,
Alex
Good Day!
Well, I must say I was really pleased to see that you created an android app for Highrise. My company just started using highrise and…I LOVE IT! So I was equally excited to find an app for my phone so that while out and about all my info would come with me in an easily accessible app.
So far the concept is phenominal! I’ve tried to email from RT and the emails that are displayed in the contacts information is a partial address. (I used people I know have correct emails in Highrise). When I went to email them from my phone it took me to my default email account (Just so happens to be my personal account) and RT put a “,” for the contacts email address. So either this is a glitch in the RT app or…I am missing something.
Also I only have maybe 500 contacts enetered…It seems to me that RT takes a considerable amount of time to load…is that normal?
Thanks a lot for your input
-Kirsten
This is exactly what I am looking for… however, I can’t seem to find it in the market. I’m on HTC Hero, Android 1.5, is there a minimum version I need?
@Alex – Thanks for the very detailed feedback. Yes, the Vcard method is just a quick fix. One other thing to note though is instead of uploading it to gmail you can download it to your sdcard and there are apps which will import it to your contacts. This way there is no delay with the gmail sync. We are working very hard on improving the app as we go along. We already have a release candidate that provides a new way of dealing with offline syncing. Also search will be done through the Highrise api.
@Kirsten – This is a known bug about the email address. We have a quick fix and it should hit the android market in a matter of days.
Keep the feedback coming!…
@Tyler – The current version doesn’t support 1.5 – We are working on this as fast as we can and hope to either change it to add 1.5 support, or provide a separate version that will work on 1.5. Will report back soon.
We have just released a version for Android 1.5 – search for Rooftop on the Android market.
1.5 does not support multiple screen sizes. This is not a big problem, it just affects the icon sizes. It does mean we’re releasing the 1.5 version as a separate app (so we can still support multiple screen sizes).
If you purchase the 1.5 version and want to trade up when your Android version is updated then let us know, you’ll have to purchase the standard version of Rooftop but we can refund this.
Brendan — Excellent, I’ll keep fiddling w/ it, will try the SD card method as a workaround. I’ll say again: I REALLY appreciate your work on this so far and am very hopeful you can get it to the point where I can use RT for routine integration of HR & Droid, mainly so I have HR data for phone calls and email. The speed and partial emails make that unworkable right now, so we’re not there yet, but I’ll look forward to seeing next version for some further improvements. I don’t know whether you need beta testers, I’d be pleased to offer feedback as you go — no big deal either way, I just really want this to work. Thanks again, happy coding.
Just saw the update, great improvements:
Email addresses are now working.
Search is MUCH faster – 4-10 secs, still too slow but way better. And: it searches my entire contact list, not just the A-Co group, that was critical. Hope you can keep fine tuning the speed, this is already a huge improvement.
Search still not working on Company or Firstname, but I can live w/ that temporarily.
Thanks, keep up the great work.
Couple more little ones:
Home address: City State, Zip are fine. But Street Address shows data fr Work address field, not Home address field.
Company name on individual listings is missing. I get the name, title, and then phone, email, etc. But not company name. Maybe you’re not pulling in Company name data at all, which might explain why I get nothing when I search on Company name. Or maybe it’s a different issue here.
Thanks.
Does rooftop work with the Archos 5 internet tablet? What about the display since it is larger than a smartphone display?
@Nate – The Archos 5 Internet tablet runs Android so it should work fine. The screen has the same resolution as the Nexus One, so should work just the same. We haven’t directly tested it but feel free to give it a try, you can always cancel and refund within 24 hours.
@Alex – Great to hear. We now do search via the Highrise API. In theory the results you get should be the same as if you did a search whilst running the web app. Yep, we fixed the email address bug also.
I’ve passed on the other notes you made to our lead developer and we’ll see what we can do. All feedback is welcome
Over the weekend I had a couple of ideas about speed improvements as that seems to be a key issue.
The good news is: I’ve just uploaded an update version of Rooftop – Rooftop 2.0 – it applies to everyone running Android 1.6 and above.
The key change is that a lot of the data that is brought back is now stored in RAM, so when you first load the Dashboard (e.g) it will still take as long as previously, but if you go out back into the main Tabs screen then when you return to the Dashboard it will load almost immediately.
Getting the best out of Rooftop:
If you exit the app completely it is likely to lose a lot of data stored in the RAM, my suggestion is: if you want to leave the app running in your phone as a background process just hit your phone’s Home Key, not the Back Key to navigate to other apps. You’ll find Rooftop a lot more responsive this way.
Refreshing items:
Note that Rooftop will now not be checking with Highrise every time you go into Dashboard/Tasks/Cases/Deals , to force a refresh of these click on the “Up” arrow in Dashboard/Deals, or in Tasks/Cases hit Phone Menu Key->Refresh
Small change to tasks:
Long click on a task allows you to update (as before) if the task is attached to a contact you can now click through to view the contact details. This came out of a comment we had emailed to us and should be useful for a lot of people.
Thanks everyone for all your feedback!
Now ~4-8 secs to search — same as last prior version, but that was much faster that earlier. Should it be faster?
The trick for me is still usability for basic phone / email / sms. After loading app, then entering name and then hitting find, it takes 4-8 secs to bring return a list of names. In contrast, native droid contact app loads, hit search, and it searches while you’re typing the name, not quite instantaneous but very snappy. Hope you can get close to that.
Perhaps the target user for RT is someone whose priority is to get their HR cases and deals data on their droid, and basic phone / email / sms usage is 2ndary for them. For that user, this is getting much closer. I’m the other kind of user, the one who wants to use HR first and foremost as my single repository for contact data, and I want to use RT to access that HR data very quickly via droid. For me, case and deal data matters, but I’m going to do most of that entry and viewing in HR via laptop, not on droid, I need only passable access to that part of my data on my droid. What I do need is immediate access to contact data, to dial calls and send emails / sms. I’m curious to hear what others’ main goal is, that would seem to push you guys one way or the other in terms of what to prioritize.
Related question: what’s the difference btw HR & Facebook in this regard? You may know that the FB 3rd party droid app logs into my FB acct, downloads my contacts in to the native Droid contact app, they’re all integrated w/ other info on same contacts that was already there in Droid contacts, and all are searchable via native Droid search, no need to query FB even though the data is synced w/ my FB account, and changes on the FB side seem to show up on Droid reasonably quickly. I understand you’re taking a different approach, which results in a separate parallel dataset on the droid, and so we need to use HR to query. I don’t understand why. FB certainly has lots of info associated w/ the names, it seems to handle it well, and my lay eye is looking for the same kinda functionality in a Droid-HR app like RT.
Also, fyi, still no search on First Name or on Company name. But great to see you guys flying along w/ these updates, thanks for the improvements, look forward to more as you go.
@Alex – The speed improvements are about caching some of the requested data during use of the app. Previously, the app might request Cases, but when you navigated away and came back to Cases it would reload them. Now it will remember them during a single use of the app. If you close and reopen the app it will need to get them again as they might have changed on the remote server.
Search speed and general speed of the app is now limited just by the time it takes to make a request to the 37 signals server. That is always going to take a few seconds. The only way to majorly reduce that now is to fully sync all your account data offline, which is quite a major undertaking. Its something we will consider based on the feedback we receive, but its a large amount of work for each second we want to shave off.
For the moment we will concentrate on smaller features that have a better payout to complexity ratio. For example, we are thinking of a providing an option to download all your contacts to your native address book automatically, which seems to be your most pressing request. We also have to note that many users might not want this (they might prefer to keep their personal contact list separate to their Highrise contacts) so the app wouldn’t do this automatically, it would just be an option.
Keep the feedback coming. It’s all useful
I see — now, when I go back to RT and hit contacts (so long as I have not force closed the app), instead of reloading for 30sec, it immediately returns to previous displayed contacts. That is a HUGE improvement. But: it gives me a very small list of names. To actually get the name I want and dial a number or address and email or sms (unless the name just happens to be on that list), I still have to use the find function and search, that’s what I was referring to, I still have the ~4sec wait at this point for each name I search. Sounds like that’s a function of sending the search back to HR and retrieving the data there, i.e. not using native onboard Droid search. For 1 call, it’s a minor hassle. For a number of sequential calls, waiting to get the name each time is challenging. So, I’m still using the native Droid app for calls as a result.
To be clear: I still strongly prefer to keep my contacts in one place = HR, and use RT to sync the HR info onto Droid. As is, I’m getting Droid info fr Google Contacts, also using HR separately b/c Google Contacts otherwise sucks (don’t get me started, I’m sure you know its limitations), and keeping those two in sync manually is a real hassle. So, that’s why I’m so hopeful about your continued progress.
And yes, download to my native address book is my goal, very much looking forward to testing that whenever it’s ready, and I do understand this takes time. In that case, would search be handled on Droid end by Droid native search? That would seems to solve both speed and misc other search limitations (street address mapping, company and first name search, etc.).
Rock on…
I’ve just published v2.1, includes a small bug fix for international numbers, but no major changes.
I’ve also brought the Rooftop 1.5 (for users of Android 1.5) inline with the other Rooftop app, so users of the 1.5 version should see a number of improvements (a few bug fixes and some speed improvements).
@Alex yes Google contacts can be pretty annoying, we’re putting some careful thought into how to get some neat syncing with the native phone contacts, and putting in a “Highrise field” to keep them separate from personal contacts.
We’ve just released a free version of Rooftop, it’s pretty basic so we’ve called it… Rooftop Basic. You can manage tasks, but not click through to contacts, the dashboard is there, but you can’t click through to view details.
So if you’re interested in Rooftop but not sure whether to part with $10 try it out!.
Been working with Highrise for a couple of months and just installed Rooftop yesterday.
Very nice looking app with a ton of potential – thank you.
1) Contacts are painfully slow – I’m on a Nexus One and I get and error almost every time with regards to offline synch. Error or no error it is very slow. (Error: Undable to synch offline due to number of contacts…) I only have about 350 contacts.
2) Would be really nice when I email someone from my contacts it showed up in my history.
3) When I am looking at a contact and I want to call them it is very difficult to actually get the call initiated. Seems if I don’t hit the little green phone I get no love
Please keep up all the great work!
Any news on possibility of getting Rooftop enabling sync of Highrise contact info into the native Contacts app on Droid? Thanks.
@Alex Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be anyway of using the API to export a vcard which could then be imported into native contacts. Which is what we were hoping as this would have been the most efficient method.
It would be possible to use the API to read each contacts details and create for each a new entry in the native address book. Depending on the size of the contacts list this task may take a long time. This seems to be the approach 37Signals have taken with their iPhone app, however there are reports from some users with large contacts list that it takes hours to do the initial sync and occasionally hangs up before the end.
So it’s on our agenda, but we’re not sure how much benefit it’s going to add.
James — Thanks, but too bad. I wonder how Facebook does it — contact info there is integrated on the fly right into the native Droid contact, and when some of the FB contacts are already in the native Droid contact list already, the FB info it appears as part of the same individual contact record, not as a dupe. Yes, there’s a separate FB app that lets you see more data that lives in FB and that other info is not integrated onto the Droid, it’s only available via the FB app. But the really cool part for us is that the basic FB contact info appears as part of the native contact listing on Droid, w/out the user having to do any setup other than logging into FB account the very first time.
Same for Google Contacts, obviously. And when you change a Google Contact, and it’s instantly on the Droid. We need that kind of integration w/ our Highrise contact data. Google has so many other limitations, that’s why we’ve been testing Highrise. And we were hoping RT would be the tool that let’s HR and Droid share contact info effectively.
As is, each time I reload RT, it starts all over with the1-2 min search. Once loaded, it’s ok…but it’s just too cumbersome for routine use as a contact manager, i.e. I need to be able to turn on my phone, go to contacts, and dial a number or send an email or sms. That just doesn’t work reliably in RT, yet, and it doesn’t sound like there’s a dependable roadmap, that’s not your priority.
Bottom line: I don’t think we are the right target user for you app, and maybe our experience is instructive for other on both sides. Specifically: having all our Highrise case and deal info on our Droids is nice, but it’s gravy, it’s not our key goal. We don’t really need to manage all that detail on the Droid side, we all carry laptops, and we’ll just log in when we need all the detail. What we do need critically is seamless contact integration between HR and Droid. Without that, Highrise actually doesn’t work for us. I understand other users have different priorities. For those who feel that having mobile access to their HR case and deal data is critical, and for whom convenient contact info may be less critical, RT seems like a terrific product.. But for us, it doesn’t do the basic thing we need = contact integration and simple access. So we’re going to go w/ a different contact solution, not Highrise. We may be back after we fish around for a while, not clear where we’ll land yet. I think you have the guts of a very nice add-on for Highrise, it just doesn’t do the key thing that we require, yet.
So, I’ll quit beating a dead horse, and wish you all well. Thanks for all your thoughtful suggestions as we’ve been testing.
The $10 was really steep. This should be much further down the road. To come back to this site regularly and get no official update on what is going on, if anything, is frustrating.
- SLOW
- Contacts don’t show up even though I have them in highrise.
- Sometime when I update info from my Nexus One it shows up immediately. Sometimes it takes hours and sometime it take a day.
- When I email or call someone from within the app this should be auto-noted (as per the iPhone app which works perfectly).
Desperate to roll this out to my entire company – but can’t do it until it works….or someone tells me when I can expect an update.
Thanks
@Jude
Thanks for the feedback, we’re working on an update which should be completed by the 12th May.
The update will include
- an option to send contacts through to your native contacts lists
- auto-noting of emails sent and an option to note phone calls made, as you suggest
- option to search contacts immediately (no waiting for them to load), this comes from another user suggestion (thanks for all this feedback everyone!)
- a few other other small points about formatting
The issue you point out about updating info from your Nexus One sounds odd, do you mean your online Highrise account is not updated? On the other hand if changes are just not showing up on your device it may be that you need to refresh the particular section you are in (for example in the Dashboard click the up-arrow to retrieve the latest information). In the update I will introduce some UI changes so it is more obvious what needs to be done to get the latest – a refresh option in the menu items on every page would be best I think.
If anyone has anything else they’d really like to see, let us know and we’ll try to get it in – this update or subsequently.
Checking on the May 12 update target… did this get done?
Update:
As of yesterday Rooftop 3.0 is out there, with changes as described above.
Note: to search contacts without loading any (this can save a lot of time) just click the magnifying glass icon on the main app screen (next to Contacts), clicking Contacts will load the first couple of hundred contacts as before.
Another small change that was asked for is that you can now click on a phone number to call, as well as the telephone icon.
@James
Not exactly sure what my issue was with the contacts not updating but I think it has something to do with the contacts themselves. I did a mass import from Google Apps and it didn’t go smoothly (import/export always a nightmare). Since that time I’ve moved to a different company and am rolling all this stuff out. I am also entering all contacts natively and so far have not had an issue.
The new noting features are great – THANKS!
Looking forward to the next Android update which will probably speed things up.
Forgot to mention one thing.
For the love of hockey can you please get a Backpack app out ASAP!
Many thanks,
JB
We’re not huge Backpack users I’m afraid!
Is the App available for Android 2.2 (Froyo)? I’ve tried to locate the App in the Marketplace — searching for ‘Rooftop’ , ‘Highrise’ and ‘Staircase’ — to no avail.
Thanks for your help,
Dan
Hi Dan,
The app should be available on Android 2.2 (Froyo) – All Android apps are supposed to, in theory, be forwards compatible.
Have you been able to view/use the app previously with other versions or is this the first time you are using it? Please send us some more details via email with your location & phone model.
Thanks
@Brendan, @Dan
Following up on this, I suspect this is a problem with the device ‘fingerprint’.
The fingerprint is linked to the OS and phone combination, Google has a database of of fingerprints, any android device can access the market, but if the fingerprint is not recognised ‘copy protected apps’ (which can’t be put on the SD card) will be invisible, this means most paid apps are invisible.
There are two things you can do:
1. wait, with the HTC Desire in the UK there was a similar problem – when it first came out paid apps were invisible for the above reason. I think in that case Google added the new fingerprint to their database and that sorted it.
2. There is a fix:
http://www.blogsdna.com/10758/fix-protected-apps-not-showing-on-leaked-froyo-nexus-one.htm
This fools the market into thinking you are running a 2.1 device. I think the problem this fix might cause is you won’t be able to see apps targeted at a minimum 2.2 (we have a Torch app that only runs on 2.2). There’s not many apps you’ll lose this way as 2.2 did not add much new functionality for developers, but it’s probably better to wait for Google to update the fingerprint.
Hope this makes sense, it’s possible it’s something else but this is my best guess,