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Ted Patrick - Events & Community @ Adobe Systems
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Basecamp Review
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Published
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
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3:35 AM
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About 3 months ago, I tried out Basecamp by 37signals. It has changed the way I do business and work with clients and projects in general. Basecamp is project management with blog simplicity.&Basecamp - http://www.basecamphq.com
When Basecamp was released I thought it would fit the way I work on projects and assist me with project management. I had no idea it would affect my business the way it has. I have never been the best at project organization, but having one central location for clients and projects has made things simple. Every version release, every proposed change, every specification, all documentation, and notes about a project resided in Basecamp. Plus providing external users access, has really empowered my clients to contribute directly to a project.
So what does Basecamp do? Basecamp is an extranet where you create and manage projects. A project consists of Messages, To-Dos, Milestones, Files, and People. It takes all of 5 minutes to create a new project (with users) and adding project items is a snap. When you post files, they are ftp'd to a folder on your server and organized by project. Whenever you make a post to a Basecamp project you can select a set of people you want to know about it and they receive an emailed version of the posting. These messages keep users informed about the project and provide the right balance of simplicity while obtaining invaluable feedback.
I recently completed a project with Macromedia due to ship shortly called COLA. COLA used Basecamp to manage the development process start to finish. The project started with 2 users and now hosts 11 users. The project site serves a nice history of the project with notes on changes, major decisions, code snippets, and full releases. The most useful feature is comments, as any file or message supports comments by users. Since comments are archived by message they are easy to review and work into a project.
Having a common place to manage projects and clients is invaluable. When I land a new client or project, I can have a project site up and running in 5 minutes to capture the essence of project notes and thoughts. If you ever wanted to impress a client, sending them a Basecamp login on the first day of a new project.
Give Basecamp a try, you will be surprised how it changes your projects.
Cheers,
Ted ;)
7 Responses to “Basecamp Review”
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Basecamp looks pretty good. I have been using Mantis (http://www.mantisbt.org/) which is free, but not as user-friendly. It works for the more techie types, but BaseCamp would be something that I could have anyone use.
I just wish they sold it as a standalone that I could run from my own web site.
Mantis is great, been using it for a while... But I see it as more of a bug tracking piece of software rather than a project management tool... More akin to BugZilla than MS Project...
Basecamp was OK, but their customer service left something to be desired. I switched over to OnStage and would recommend it.
I agree with mray, basecamp is more about tracking issues than planning projects. I chose Wrike for project management. There are some heavy reasons for my decision:
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/134816/project_management_lite_basecamp_and_wrike.html
Basecamp is ok, but only OK. We've recently began using YouFig (www.youfig.com) for our team collaboration. And slowly the entire company is starting to use it and its community features. They offer documents, spreadsheets, calendars, outlook integration and so much more. And they're not charging a cent.
I actually tried a few collaboration tools, from the expensive Webex, Hyper Office to wonderful Onstage and Basecamp... I actually tried Basecamp and Onstage at the same time... and I eventually stuck with basecamp. :-)
Basecamp is easy on the eys and functionality is wonderful. I do miss the Work and Task Project Management of Onstage and wonderful Customer Support. :-)
You can also try Manymoon, it's free:
http://www.manymoon.com
With Manymoon you can:
* Managed private and shared To Do Lists and Projects.
* Upload documents and add them to tasks and projects.
* Integrate with Google Docs and Google Calendar.
* Automatically convert emails into tasks.
* Twitter-like feature to let people know what you are working on.