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by Patrick Lenz.
Original Post: Highrise: Use Tags as the Poor Man's Case
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Well, I love cases. And I hate them at the same time.
The problem with cases
We’re currently in the process of building a house. That means a lot of correspondence and a lot of involved people. I currently have more than 30 people attached to my ‘House’ case. Arguably, I could split it up into multiple cases, but that wouldn’t address my issues and concerns with the use of a busy case like this.
First of all, case assignment is a manual process. And it’s always at least 2 clicks away (and something you have to remember doing). (Reducing clicks is good, btw.)
When you’re adding a note to a contact, you have to remember clicking that little “Show options (files, cases, permissions)” to actually pick your case from the drop down menu. Admittedly, 37signals did try to reduce clutter in that form and all options besides the case drop down would actually *be* clutter. However, one out of two notes I’m adding I forget to assign a case. Blame it on my age.
Things get much worse when you’re just forwarding or Bcc’ing email to Highrise. That puts off case assignment even farther as you have to remember to actually open Highrise to do so. That, I won’t remember for life.
Enter Tags
The tags implementation in Highrise has recently seen welcome improvements. Most recently, they rolled out an update that lets you filter by multiple tags and a while farther back they gave us
tag streams and tag tabs.
What especially the latter improvement buys us is a way to circumvent the cumbersome case assignment problem I was talking about in the last section. tag streams will collect all correspondence with contacts having a particular tag assigned automatically, whether you manually add notes directly in Highrise or forward/bcc email to Highrise. The tag stream will immediately reflect the new item.
Another little nicety of the tag streams is that they carry over the little ‘Task completed’ markers for completed tasks assigned to contacts tagged with a particular tag.
Tags, as mentioned before, will also show up as one of the recently visited tabs at the top of the page, next to contacts, companies, and ‘real’ cases. Additionally, the ‘Tags’ tab provides you with a list of all of your tags as well as recently viewed ones for easy and speedy access.
Finally, if you’re on the Free or Personal plans of Highrise, tags obviously won’t count against your limit of cases are allowed to have open simultaneously.
The Drawbacks
We all know there is No Free Lunch.
Using tags for cases means that as soon as a contact is involved in more than one case (or tag) you’re out of luck. The correspondence of both tags would accumulate in the tag streams and things would get wonky.
Also, while you can assign tasks to a case, you cannot assign tasks to tags (yet?). While this is not mission critical, I occasionally make use of this feature when dealing with cases.
On a visible note, cases nicely display the attached contacts and companies right there next to the stream of notes attached to a case. Highrise’s tag streams are just that, streams of correspondence. There’s a separate page for listing the contacts and companies tagged with a given tag.
Lastly, tags don’t have an open/close status like cases do. And since Highrise doesn’t allow for renaming of tags after the fact, you’re stuck with either removing tags from contacts after projects are done or have them stick around forever.
Conclusion
I mostly find myself using tags to complement cases, not instead of them. I hate going over a day’s correspondence to reassign cases so I tend to trust my tagging when reviewing a certain project’s correspondence through its tag stream. Cases still give the better overview in terms of being open and closed, though. Maybe a future Highrise update will rectify some of the concerns I’ve raised in this post requiring another mind shift.
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