I took the plunge and signed up last week for Basecamp, a blog-based project management solution. We have so much going on at Corante (and a mess of announcements in the works) that I was starting to lose myself in the details.

The results have been really good. I quickly configured the service with Corante logo, etc., set up a dozen projects in a few hours, and invited about a dozen collaborators in various projects.

Basecamp is a great example of what specialized, blog-based tools can do for project coordination.

Here's a screenshot of the "Dashboard" view, which provides each user with a summary of information for all their projects.

The folks at Edgecamp enumerate 6 points on this screenshot

1. Your logo appears in the upper-left.
   
2. Late milestones are called out and linked.
   
3. Any milestones due in the next 14 days are plotted and linked on a calendar, starting with today's date. If there are no milestones in the next 14 days, the next 3 milestones are listed.
   
4. Projects that have new posts or comments since your last visit are labeled "UPDATED".
   
5. Projects that haven't had a new post or comment in 30 days are automatically moved to the Inactive Projects section.
   
6. The "What's fresh" log shows the last 25 posts, comments, completed milestones, and completed to-dos across all of your projects. Clicking one of the categories (eg. "Milestones") filters the list.
   
7. [not numbered on the screenshot] Track all projects in your favorite aggregator with the "What's fresh" RSS feed.

I really like the RSS feed; I have tried to turn off email notifications in general, as a result.

The blog, or "Messages" display, is a more or less no frills blog model, with comments and file attachments associated with the blog.

The file attachments caused me some hassles, and represents really the only complaint I have about the service as implemented. I had to configure a folder on the www.corante.com server for FTP access, and then configure a bunch of FTP settings within Basecamp, to get attachments to work. Seems that Basecamp is unwilling to allocate the storage needed, and provide backup, for file management. Not even for an additional fee. But the file attachments do work as advertised, once everything was set up.

The basic model is blog postings, along with the creation of milestones and to do lists. To-dos can be linked to specific milestones, and milestones can be linked to blog entries. As a result, the notifications serve as a constant reminder of what's coming in the near term.

The milestone display is limited to the next 14 day period, which is nice as a default, but I would like to enlarge to the coming month, two months, whatever, on demand.

The projects are of two types -- Internal, where only employees or contractors can see what's being said, or Customer focused, where your clients can participate. Pretty cool. And you can even tag some items in Customer projects as private, like a private to-do list, or blog posting, that your client can't see, but your team can.

The other missing pieces:

• Integration with Outlook -- they provide iCalendar support, but I would like to be able export or sync milestones and to-dos with Outlook.
  
• Calendar view of the whole thing -- blog entries, to-dos, comments, file postings, etc.
  
• Integration with IM -- they nicely allow you to enter a single (grrrr) IM handle, but they should also allow alerting through IM. If they talked to the nice Carr brothers over at 2Entwine, they could ping people on every service (if desired) whenever there is new content in general, or on specific projects. I don't always have my RSS feeds open, but I am always in IM.
  
• Email posting -- would be sensible to support an email posting (as much as I personally hate it), with a private email address associated with each project, including attached files.
  
• Controllable "dashboards" -- I would like to be able to define arbitrary aggregation of project related content, and define them as dashboards. For example, I would like to aggregate project information from various projects into a single dashboard, using categories, and filtering out all private information, and serving that information up to some defined list of participants. As an example, imagine pulling information from all Corante Research Projects that are tagged as "Public" and serving it up to all our Advisory Research clients, no matter what Advisory Service they have signed up for.
  
• Nested projects -- need subprojects. For example, I would like to coordinate with each client within the Social Tools Advisory Service individually, at a subproject level, but by the same token, I would like to have all members of the service to have access to some common information.
  
• Trackbacks -- obviously.

I am very pleased with what I have seen, and look forward to increased functionality in the future. But Basecamp seems to offer that critical mass of features that meets the 80/20 rule: 80% of everything you want to do can be satisfied by 20% of all imaginable functionality.