A few months ago, I saw an ad in the margin of someone's blog about Basecamp, a blog-based project management solution. Being in desperate need of a means to coordinate the exploding number of projects at Corante as well as my natural curiousity for all things collaborative, I went and took a look. A few days later, I was convinced, and I signed up for the unlimited account. I now am managing something like two dozen projects at Basecamp, and I though it would be a good time to relate my experience and impressions about the technology. I also had a conversation yesterday with Jason Fried, of 37 Signals, Basecamp's developer, and he has filled me in on some future directions for the technology.

Socialized Project Management

The schema for Basecamp is relatively spartan:

• Projects are either internal to your group, or associated with a particular client, and in either case you can provide various sorts of access rights to the corresponding flavors of participants. Within your onw group, you can distinguish between 'employees' and 'consultants'.
  
• Within a project there are means to create milestones and to-do lists, an area in which files may be uploaded and shared, and 'messages' (= blog entries). Files can be uploaded directly to the file folder, or indirectly as an attachment to a message. To-do lists may be associated with a milestone, or indendent of them. These files, unlike all the other content, are actually stored on your own server -- you have to set up an FTP arrangement to get this working, which took me a few hours.
  
• You are presented a 'dashboard' that lists your projects, as well as the most topical information associated with all the projects you have access to when you login to the system. This includes overdue or pending milestones, the most recent five entries in each project, and so on.
  
• Each project, once opened, has a project overview, that includes the blog, outstanding and upcoming milestones, and so on. This display also includes a 'next 14 days' snapshot of upcoming milestones.
  
  

• Messages can be categorized in the usual way, by selection from a list, or you can define a new category. But if you take this second option, instead of popping up a dialog box to allow you to name the category, you are presented with a message that informs you that if you creat a new category you will lose the text you have entered on the message. This is annoying, and forces you to save the entry uncategorized, then redit it, creating the new category on the second pass. Ugh.
  
• Basecamp offers next to no options for customization or tweaking. You can't fiddle with the background colors, arrangement of elements on the page, or even the length of time you would like to look ahead for upcoming events in the project overview. This is the outgrowth of the 37 Signals design philosophy, I came to understand by talking with Jason Fried, but seems a bit too limiting to me.
  
• It would be reasonable to offer some hosted version of the file storage, on a per GB basis, so that folks could avoid the FTP hassles that I went through, and which for some would be impossibel since it requires having a server accessible to the Internet.
  

The Future

The folks at 37 Signals have been busy on other projects (see this piece, for example), but are working hard on some great new features for Basecamp.

Most important, they will soon release email integration, so that users will be able to email messages to projects. "But Stowe, you hate email!" Yes, but I want some means to work offline, too. Each project will have an email address, and emailed messages will be categorized as such by default. This will allow users to have at least some means of working offline on projects. (I suggested that they take a look at Ecto and other offline blogging tools, and Jason said he'd look into that.)

Obviously, I would like to see instant messaging integration, but Jason and I had to end our talk before I could dig into that. But the immediacy of RSS feeds give Basecamp a real time collaboration feel, so its almost as if already.