Log in to Backpack Don't have a Backpack account? Current Backpack customers can sign in here. We launched Backpack back in 2005 so people could “keep life’s loose ends together” in one place online. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have kept millions of loose ends safe in their online Backpacks. However, because we haven’t given Backpack much attention in the last few years, and as part of refocusing our efforts on a slimmer product line, we’ve decided to no longer offer Backpack to new customers. Existing customers will be able to continue using Backpack as they always have. Your account, your Backpack pages, and your data remains safe in Backpack. You can sign in to your account here. For those new customers who are interested in something like Backpack, we highly recommend checking out Basecamp. It does much of what Backpack does — and more. Jason Fried, Founder & CEO, Basecamp Backpack makes it easy to keep all of your essential documents, information, schedules in one place all the time.

Never lose the notes, files and data that you depend on. Always available and secure. Gather & share information on Backpack Pages Watch a video demonstrating how easy it is to make a Backpack Page Backpack Pages are the core of Backpack. You can add any combination of notes, to-dos, files,photos, and dividers to a Backpack Page. karrimor orkney backpackPages just take seconds to create.diophy backpack Backpack loves getting emailsupreme backpack 34th Backpack works hand in hand with email. data backpack gooniesYou can send emails or email file attachments to Backpack and they’ll automaticallyappear on your pages. Create notes, to-do lists, and photo galleries simply by sending an email to a Backpack Page.

Get your schedules together with a group calendar Watch a video overview of the Backpack Calendar Share a calendar with your co-workers (or just make one for yourself). Color-coding makes it easy to spot whichappointment is for which person. In a glance you’ll know when someone’s busy or free.Backpack will even send reminders to your email account or mobile phone! Centralize and organize group communications Watch a video demonstrating the benefits of Backpack Messages Forget messy back and forth email exchanges. Instead, use Backpack Messages to centralize your communications.Post a message and your entire team can leave comments. It’s so much cleaner. Find out what’s new in the Newsroom Watch a video overview of the Backpack Newsroom The Newsroom shows you the latest messages and comments plus you can see who’s created or changed pages,added reminders or calendar events. The latest activity is always in the Newsroom. Sharing pages with colleagues, friends, or family is easy

Watch a video demo that shows how to share Backpack pages Backpack makes it easy to share a page of information that you’ve created. People you share with canalso add new items and change content on the page. It’s perfect for quick collaboration or sharing knowledge. Never forget with Backpack Reminders Watch a video demo of how Backpack Reminders will keep your memory sharp Need to remember to rent the projector for the meeting Friday or to book the flight to LA for the client presentation next week?Backpack reminders keep you timely with email and text message notifications. Write and revise together with Writeboards Writeboards are text documents that save a new version each time you make a change. You can jump back to any version andeasily compare versions, so you never need to worry about overwriting a good idea. Writeboards work even better with groups.Each version shows the person who authored it, and anyone involved can post comments to discuss the document.

The Journal keeps track of what everyone is working on Watch a video that shows how the Journal keeps everyone informed The Journal helps answer these common questions: “What are you working on?” and “What have you done today?”.When your team keeps their Journals updated, everyone knows what’s getting done. Get everyone in your company or group on Backpack Watch a video that shows how easy it is to add others to your Backpack account Backpack excels when you use it with other people. Add co-workers, colleagues, friends,or family to your account and share pages, knowledge, files, calendars, reminders, and more.February 2013 Update: We’ve added a way to import your pages from Backpack into Papyrs. We just read on TheNextWeb that Backpack, a web app from 37signals is no longer accepting new signups. Existing users aren’t left out in the cold, but you can no longer sign up for their service. Backpack is pitched as an “Easy intranet for your business”.

Much like our product Papyrs. So we have always considered Papyrs good alternative to Backpack because with both products you can create pages, organize your documents and discuss and plan everything about your organization in one place. Of course there are also plenty of differences. For instance, Backpack had a lot of functionality for calendars and reminders, whereas Papyrs allows far greater flexibility in the sort of pages you can create with anything from Web Forms to Twitter widgets. And as we explain below, we also have a very different vision about intranet software. Now that Backpack is being phased out one of our competitors is, for all intents and purposes, a thing of the past. So why did 37signals decide to phase out Backpack? They didn’t say exactly, but we can pretty much guess why. When you first launch a product it has only a few core features. A new product must do a few things, and it must do those few things really well. Then, as you continue working on your product and make improvements to it (based on the feedback you get from your initial customers) the number of features in the product grows slowly but steadily.

Suppose you start with 3 different products that solve 3 distinct problems. The first product is essentially a user-friendly wiki. Companies can dump all their internal documents on there so everybody stays on the same page. The second product is for project management: it has a calendar, tasks, timelines, and some index of active and archived projects. The third product is, let’s say, for collaborative text editing. Multiple people can work on a document simulaneously and see each other’s changes and annotations. So three products: a wiki, a project management tool and a collaborative document editor. Initially all is great and these three products solve a different issue and everybody’s happy. Well, no, just *mostly* happy. Because the moment you have customers the feature requests keep rolling in and most feature requests are going to be pretty reasonable. Your users are going to want to have one login for the different products. They’re going to want one unified place where they can see all activity and updates.

And if two out of three products have a calendar, why don’t the events of one product show up on the calendar of the other? And so the apps converge… Essentially, every time you add functionality the products become more alike. These web 2.0 productivity products naturally converge towards one-another. When you add tasks to the wiki-app, it becomes more like the project managing app. And when you add rich-text notes to the project manager app it becomes more like the wiki-app. The lines between the apps get blurred and if you’re not careful the apps you built that people love slowly grow into monstrosities that attempt to do everything and as a result become complex and clunky and altogether unappealing. This is what we realized a little over a year ago when we started working on Papyrs. When it’s inevitable that users want a lot of functionality but all users want different functionality you need to make some hard choices. Even though you know you can’t keep everybody happy you still want to keep as many people as happy as you can.

We think there are two good solutions: 1) you figure out which features are most critical and you create a new app that combines the all best bits from the original 3 apps. You just focus on extreme simplicity and ruthlessly cut functionality across the board. This is what 37signals did and they launched Basecamp Next earlier this year. It has some of the functionality of Backpack, but not all. It also has most of the functionality of the original Basecamp, but not all. 2) you create a product that maximizes flexibility and give users the choice which functionality they want to include. This is what we did with Papyrs. Because Papyrs pages are just made of simple widgets that people can just drag&drop onto a page. Our users use the widgets they need and ignore the ones they don’t. The collection of widgets available to them simply grows over time. We have all sorts of customers who use Papyrs in completely different ways. And because of our widget approach we can add functionality to widgets to make our customers happier without making the product more complex for newcomers.