THIS IS NOT A 37SIGNALS SITE OR PRODUCT Current Version, Contact Us

Highrise Inquirer

An Unofficial Administrative Tool for the Highrise On-line CRM


screen shot of Perople/Companies menu

Highrise Inquirer is a desktop application that uses the Highrise API to display and modify a user's data in the on-line Highrise system. It is not a replacement for the on-line Highrise UI: it does not duplicate any on-line functionality. Highrise Inquirer does things that the on-line UI does not do.

HI does not use a "briefcase" data model: any changes you make in HI (like adding a tag or deleting a contact) happens immediately through the API.

HI is not multi-user: if someone makes changes to the data (e.g. on-line or with a different instance of HI), HI will not know about it. You can make HI reload all the data any time you want (Ctrl-F5), but it will not detect if it has obsolete data by itself.

37Signals does not support, endorse, or (apparently) appreciate this utility: do not use their forums to discuss it.

Features

You can see or hide unused tags You can remove tags from selected Persons and Companies You can add tags to any set of Persons and Companies, and even create new tags
Once it has login credentials (see Authentication), it downloads all tags, persons, and companies, as well as the tag information for each person and company (entities). This can take a little while if it has a slow connection or the user has lots of data. Thereafter, it can filter on tag set information and wildcard matches.

While HI can filter on Note and EMail message text, it does not download those data until needed. As it takes a few seconds to download each entity's Notes or EMails or both, the first time HI filters on this type of data without any other criteria takes a long time.

Tag Set Filtering

screen shot of application with one entity visible

All your tags are listed on the left. Drag and Drop the tags to either of the top two criteria boxes next to the list allow twos sets of tags (an entity must have either all the tags in the top box or all the tags in the middle box to be visible), or the bottom list.

The "BUT none of these" box lets you find entities that do not have any of these tags; if you select all the tag and drag them to this box, you will see all the entities that don't have any tags.

You can use tags to create multi-step filters. If you wanted, for example, to find all contacts in California that had not had a new Note for over six weeks: find all the contacts that have had a new Note (see Date Filter below) and add a tag to them (e.g. "new note"). Then Clear Criteria and filter on State = "ca" and drag the "new note" tag to the BUT none of these criteria box.

Text Filter

screen shot of Text and Date filter tab
Wildcard filtering takes the criterion string, removes all non-alphanumeric characters, and matches--insensitive to case--anywhere in the alphanumeric data in: s
Text Filter Scope
Definition
Notes
Names A Person's or Company's Name The first and last name of a person is concatenated, so you can search for "richardha" and match "Richard Haven"
Contacts Any part of any address
Addresses Street address
Cities
States
Zip Codes
Web URL's
IMs
Titles A Person's title (e.g. in their Company)
Backgrounds A Person's or Company's "About" text
Company Names The name of a Company or the name of a Person's Company
Sound-alike Names Similar-sounding name Enter one word of the name
Notes Text inside any note or Comment on a Note To filter on these items, Highrise Inquirer must download every Note or EMail for every Person and Company that passes all the other criteria (e.g. tags). This can take a while for the first filter pass; HI caches the data once it's retrieved
EMail Subjects The subject titles of an EMail
EMail Texts Text inside any EMail body or Comment on an EMail, including the subject title
Comments
Cases The title of a Case. Note that cases are made up of Notes and Emails belonging to People. not yet implemented
Tasks The single-line text of a Task To filter on this item, Highrise Inquirer must download every Task for every Person and Company that passes all the other criteria (e.g. tags). This can take a while for the first pass; HI caches the data once it's retrieved
Entity ID This is the internal ID of an entity. You might see it in your browser when you are looking at an entity detail in the form "http://richardchaven.highrisehq.com/people/767465".
Anywhere Highrise Inquirer will search in every place listed above To filter on Notes and EMails, Highrise Inquirer must download every Note and EMail for every Person and Company that passes all the other criteria (e.g. tags). This can take a while for the first pass; HI caches the data once it's retrieved

Phone Filter and EMail Filter

These are the not same as Text Filter above for Phone numbers and EMail addresses. They compare non-alphanumeric characters (e.g. "(" and "@") and can match from the start of the value or anywhere in the value. For instance, matching for "831" from the beginning would match a specific area code, while matching for "4472" anywhere might help figure out a caller id.

Date Filter

Allows filtering for Entities that have a date attribute between the Start and End date:
Date Filter Scope
Definition
Notes
Created A Person's or Company's first entry into Highrise
Updated A Person's or Company's most recent update in Highrise (e.g. Address, EMail)
EMail/Note A Person's or Company's EMail or Note creation
Task Due Date A Person's or Company's Task's due date
Note: If you select one of these categories, even if you leave both the Start and End date blank, each Entity must have a EMail or Note (for "EMail/Note") or at least one Task (for "Task Due Date") to appear on the grid.

Bulk Mailing

Once you have used the filters to see just the entities you are interested in, you can send them all email:


Note that you can specify a a tag to add to all the Persons and Companies that (presumably) participating in the mailing. If you want to find the entities that were visible but did not get email, either sort by the email column or add the mailing Tag to the "BUT none of these" tab criteria box.

Bulk Notes

You can add the same Note to all filtered Entities

Bulk Delete

If you need to weed out your contact list:

THIS IS NOT A TRIVIAL EXERCISE: DELETED ENTITIES ARE REALLY GONE, GONE, GONE.

Convert Persons to Companies, and Companies to Persons

Sometimes an import does not go quite right. Before you delete and re-enter by hand, try converting from one type of entity (aka Party) to another. Preserve all your Notes, EMails, Comments, and Tasks.
Currently, Conversion does NOT preserve Dates or Cases associated with the original contact: they are lost

Filtering and Changing Visible-To

screen shot of the list of groups and criteria selectors
You can check multiple groups to use as filter criteria, and you can set all of the filtered entities so they are visible to a particular group (or Everyone or Owner)

In-Place Duplicate Detection

Note that this will check all entities based on the duplicate criteria, not just the ones that match the Tag or Text filtering. Screen shot of Duplicate Criteria Tab
The small grid will show the names of the entities that match all of the selected criteria. Select one to see only those two entities in the main grid. While this will find possibly duplicate entities,  you have to double-click on an entity to go into Highrise and do the Merge there. 

Selection Criteria

  • Full Name
  • Last Name
  • Sound-alike Name
 Only one of these three criteria will apply
  • Address
 The entire address must match
  • City, State
  • Postal Code
  • EMail Address
  • Phone Number
 Only numeric digits matter in this comparison

Check for Missing or Irregular Data

Note that these test apply only to the filtered entities (see Tag or Text filtering), not all entities the way duplicate checking does.
Screen shot of Duplicate Criteria Tab
The small grid will show the names of the entities that match any of the tests. Select one to see it in the main grid and double-click to open it in Highrise.

Available Tests

You can combine any number of tests at once.
Find reversed Person names Find commas at the end of the first name: Smith, John
Find invalid phone numbers This tests for US and Canadian phone formats for US and Canadian entities (as taken from the first address or the default)
Find invalid email addresses Insures that the email address can possibly be valid
Find invalid web addresses Insures that the URL follows the standard addressing scheme
Find web addresses that don't exist Actually tries to connect to the URL
Find incomplete postal addresses For US and Canadian entities,  finds addresses that do not have  postal codes, etc..
Find postal addresses without a country
Find duplicate Notes/EMails
Find Company postal addresses in Persons
Find Company email addresses in Persons
Find Company phone numbers in Persons
Find Company Notes/Emails in Persons
Find Companies with no Persons
Find Persons with no Company

Backup and Restore

The Backup Data dialog The Restore Data dialog
Highrise Inquirer backs up to the format used by the Highrise API for Persons and Companies as well as Notes/EMails/Tasks. HI adds Tag elements to the Person and Company formats, and adds the Entity ID to the Note/EMail/Task data.

Note that you can add a specific Tag to restored items. This allows easy rollbacks and duplicate identification.

Configurable Columns

Highrise Inquirer is not a replacement for Highrise; it does not allow editing; however in response to user demand, we have added columns for State and Zip Code:

Startup

Command-line Parameters

Highrise Inquirer accepts some command-line arguments: Note: HI will use the Site Address plus the extension "config" as a session's configuration file name unless you pass it a different name. HI will use the authentication token rather than username and password when it has both. If you supply enough information to log in, HI will try to connect on startup.

Saved Settings

HI will save your site address, authentication token, and user name (but not your password) when you exit in a file named after your site address plus the extension ".config" in the same directory as the EXE. It will load the values from this file on startup; if HI has enough information, it will try to connect on startup. If you want to prevent either automatically loading the saved information or saving the information, hold down the Shift key during startup or shutdown.

Current Version

The current version is 1.2. It is a compressed Windows™ 32 executable with no external dependencies (i.e.. no DLL's, MFC, .NET, etc.). download it and place it in a directory and run. It will save configuration files in the same directory.

To download, copy this text to your clipboard, paste it into your browser, and manually remove the plus:  

                    http://highriseinquirer.santacruzsoftware.com/Highrise+Inquirer.exe
                                                         remove this -------------------^

This simple task prevents spiders and crawlers from harvesting this executable

To register for any future notifications, email (remove the spaces and quotes).

I am no longer enhancing this product. If you find a bug not listed below, please email me. I am available for consulting if you have an application or need that uses the Highrise API.

Known Issues

Some users cannot bulk tag. The API behaves inconsistently Reproducible for some (large, paying) accounts. I asked 37S to look at the behavior; no response yet. Also posted on the forum.
One user reported that removing SSL from their account (temporarily) allowed them to bulk-tag.
One user reports that they cannot use Group Email due to an SMTP error Reproducible. Their SMTP settings look fine; 
Cannot Backup, Restore, Convert, or search on the new Entity Dates Wait for 37S to put this into the API
Cannot Rename or delete tags Wait for 37S to put this into the API
Cannot backup Comments (and converting Persons to Companies fails) Error in the API: posted to 37Signals on the forum
The version 1.2 will ignore this failure. It will not backup comments and an entity's comments will be lost when converting a Person to a Company or vice versa.
The main grid does not refresh automatically under Windows Vista I am working to migrate to a more current version of Delphi to address this.

Highrise Inquirer is donation-ware: if you find it useful, you can gift me by clicking the link to the right.