I recently signed up for a Highrise account because I already use Backpack and Basecamp on a daily basis and I find them quite useful.
It’s worth noting that Highrise is brand new from 37signals, so there’s some expectation of “not quite polished” going in. I manually added two contacts to Highrise a few days ago and the interface looked nice. Last night I decided to finally get my One True List of contacts together to get rid of my previous situation where they’re spread haphazardly between my cell phone, my Apple Address Book and Gmail.
I used iSync to sync my phone contacts into my Apple Address Book, then spent about a half hour going through and removing the duplicates, cleaning up, etc. I then figured it would be a good time to get this nice clean contact list into Highrise. Exporting all contacts as a vCard in Address Book was easy (CTRL+click on “All”, select “Export Group vCard…”).
I then uploaded my vCard with 194 contacts to Highrise via the “Upload a vCard file” page. I got a little notice at the top of the screen: “A quick note: Since you’re importing more than 10 contacts at once we’ve added your request to a queue. We’ll send you an email when the import is complete. It should just take a few minutes.”
OK, that’s fine. About 5 or 6 minutes later I got an email and all of my contacts were in Highrise. Looking at my contacts in Highrise, though, I realized something crucial — all of my contacts were “people”, none of them “companies”. I slapped myself on the forehead and went back into Address Book to mark the appropriate records as companies (using ⌘+\).
After marking all of the appropriate contacts as companies, I needed to re-import into Highrise. I figured that I should just delete all contacts currently in Highrise so I could start clean with a new import. After searching around the interface, I couldn’t find anything that would let me delete all contacts. I searched the forum and found this thread which essentially says to use this command:
Deleting all contacts in Highrise
curl -u 'YOURUSERNAME:YOURPASSWORD' -X DELETE \ "http://YOURSUBDOMAIN.highrisehq.com/people/[5200-5299]"
The only problem I see with using that command is that it assumes I know the IDs of my lowest and highest contacts, which I don’t and which seem to be ordered randomly in the lists within Highrise.
I decided to forget the mass deletion step and just re-import. Surely it will be smart enough to reconcile the imported contacts, right? Surely if it can’t figure it out on its own, there will at least be some merging interface or a warning about duplicates, right?
Wrong!
Hi Brad. Sorry for your troubles. Unfortunately, vcards are iffy around the support of companies instead of people. It’s all done in extensions. So we still have some work ahead of us reconciling those extensions and making sure what we do work across all the major clients. Hopefully companies will eventually be natively supported in the vcard standard.
In addition, we’re planning to add undo to mass importing. So you can say, “please disregard this batch of 250 that went sour”. That should make it easier to experiment and to regret.
We do have a merging interface, though. But it happens on a one-by-one basis. So it’s not well suited for 250 duplicates.
Hehe.
http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blog/basecampprojectmanagementblindedbyideology/
DHH: Thanks for the info. I’ve also had to deal with vCard’s shortcomings firsthand. If there were a more robust way to sync Address Book with Highrise I would certainly be open to using it.
Also, the undo mass import feature sounds great.
For what it’s worth, I bit the bullet and took the 25 minutes to view source on the pages in Highrise and copy out all of the people IDs.
The curl command was quite simple with a “{12345,12142,…}” expansion of 176 IDs. I used the username provided under “My Info”, “Reveal authentication token for feeds/API” with no password. It finished the deletion in under 2 minutes and now my Highrise account is fantastically clean.