Company Review: 37Signals

37Signals Company is a unique and successful venture that builds inexpensive, simple and easy to use web-based software for all types of businesses. 37Signals thrives on simplicity and creativity. Business clients can use company's different web-based soft wares over the Internet without the need of any CD's or downloads. 37Signals takes care of upgrades, security, backup and any other maintenance issues.

When I read about the company on different newspapers and magazines, I decided to checkout their website. I was very impressed with the simplicity and clarity of the website. Their main products were neatly displayed on the right hand side. On the left hand side, a short and through the point marketing message was displayed.

37Signals's four main products are following:

1- Basecamp

Basecamp is an interactive web-based project collaboration tool where business clients can perform various tasks. Clients can save and share their files, work on the deadlines and do other administrative and managerial jobs like assigning tasks and record feedbacks. It sounded like one-stop software for the managers. According to the company, Basecamp focus is on communication and collaboration.

2- Highrise

Highrise is another 37Signals innovate product. Highrise is a web-based software where clients can track all of their leads, proposals, wins or losses. I see it as a very useful tool to store and organize critical documents. Clients can also manager their email within Highrise software, able to import or export Microsoft's Outlook, Excel and maintain company or business address book. The most attractive feature of Highrise is the ability to archive history of calls, meetings and conversations with the other clients. Such archive can literally save companies millions of dollars and can avoid any legal law suites since companies will have all the records saved.

Highrise product also help clients to see the "follow-ups", schedule up to whole week; sets up reminders to write client a note such as thank you notes, keeps all accounts at one location and even schedules a follow up call with lead.

3- Backpack

Backpack product of Signal 37 is the storage area for a company to store essential documents like schedules, information, critical documents. The benefit of the backpack is the security of the documents and it's availability at any time. Backpack concept is similar to a student's backpack concept where a student keeps all essential documents for his or her school for easy availability. The difference is Signal37 is a virtual backpack. Some of the other features of backpack are ability to share calendar with colleagues, color-code the appointments and tracking the calendar.

4- Campfire

Campfire is a group chat tool that allows setting up chat rooms. Companies can invite their clients, vendors and even colleagues to chat for an important question. It is a quick way of having an internal communications.

Signal37 Company claims that over 100,000 people have used this product and have sent more than 60 million chat messages to their clients, colleagues and other remote teams on their website. The feature that I liked about Campfire is the ability of savings the transcripts.

These are just four of the Signal37 products. There are other popular products which are not listed in this article and very useful for companies, weather small or large.