37signals, the company behind the successful online collaboration/project management tools Basecamp, Campfire and Backpack, has launched a new service: Highrise.

Highrise is a shared contact/task manager. It’s organized around people - you connect tasks, events and reminders to actual people, and you share the result with your entire company. It works the other way, too - you can see which people and tasks do you need to see and do for every particular project, called Case in Highrise. It is all connected by the Dashboard, a one-look view on your latest notes, contacts and tasks.

Highrise can also easily integrate e-mails, SSL encryption, and a different set permissions for each of the individual accounts within your company. It supports customization to better fit your company’s website, too.

The most basic Highrise account is free, but it’s quite bare. To really enjoy everything this service has to offer you are going to have to move to one of the paid plans. The most expensive one is called Max, it costs $149 per month and it includes an unlimited number of users, 20 GB of storage for files, and 50.000 contacts you can track.

Highrise seems to be another winner in the already very successful 37 signal range of products. However, since the products they’re offering seem to be complementary - for example, Backpack’s calendar would fit quite well into Highrise - one has to wonder why haven’t they simply connected them into one big application?