Basecamp Review

In business, it is essential to streamline your operations as much as possible. Here at Eviser, we use a number of tools to make our business run more efficiently and cost-effective.

Even with a small two person company like ours – based in the same office (in fact we sit back to back!), I felt it was important to have a centralised point for organising our day-to-day work.

I’d like to talk about one particular tool we use, called Basecamp. This is an online website application which enables Eviser to take control of our projects, manage our workload, assign tasks to each other and have a complete picture of our workload.

Keeping in Control of your Work

As a small business grows, co-ordinating the work among employees, clients and other suppliers becomes more important.

Project management software aims to help organise teamwork. Project management software has been around forever. But a new generation of web-based solutions have developed, and being a web-based business – we thought this would work best.

Web-based project management services are inexpensive and easy to set up. They are suited for businesses who have team members working on the same project, or need to involve their clients as the job progresses.

Each team member, client or project supplier just needs access to the Internet to participate in project planning. Easy peasy! You’ll find our login link at the top of each Eviser page.

Choosing the Right Project Management Solution

The market for online managed project management and business collaboration software is vast. I scoured a good dozen or so sites to find he best solutions for us, a small business with lots of work.

My shortlist comprised of:

Weboffice – Feature rich, but a tad over my monthly budget.
Huddle.net – Superb – just fell short on a few features
BT Workspace – The new site from BT (they are just rolling out new features now)
Basecamp – the winner!

All the above are well regarded, having read various online reviews of each solution.

I tested various systems, almost settling for BT’s new Workspace tool. We used this for a week or two and found it really good. The shared document handling is great, with real time editing of Word and Excel documents – just simply open, edit then save – and the new version automatically updates online. Things were looking good for Bt Workspace! Alas – it wasn’t to be. The system had flaws with the document handling. Some features worked in IE7, some didn’t. Some features worked in Firefox, some didn’t. Some features worked in Vista, some didn’t. They promised compatibility updates, which they are currently rolling out at the time of writing – but we couldn’t wait.

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Basecamp Wins!

Basecamp is the smarter, easier, more elegant way to collaborate on your internal and client projects

Basecamp Website

After having numerous browser and software issues with BT, I decided that Basecamp was the most suitable system for us. Here’s why:

The time tracking aspect of the application really did swing it for me – having the ability to plan your work, then log how long the work actually takes is great for future planning (how many people actually cost their time properly against a job?)
The user friendly interface makes it simple to get to where you want and instantly see what needs doing.
Reasonable pricing ensures that our overheads do not take a huge whack! We are using the Plus plan – which gives us up to 35 active projects and plenty of document space. Currently priced at $49, around £24 – its worth its weight in gold!
It felt right! Plain and simple it felt right, it worked for us and I liked it!

Basecamp in Action

Basecamp enables people to create multiple projects and ensure that everything that needs to be done – gets done. For example, we are currently working on a new project for an online recruitment website called RecruitaSite. This is an internal project and we are working very closely with another company on this.

We created the project “Recruitasite” in Basecamp, and then we created the permission levels. The system created an email invitation to our partner company – which means they can log into to the same area and access everything. Instead of emailing each other – we now have a centralised location to help us be more efficient and get things done.

Basecamp Features

In our Basecamp project, we have a number of really useful tools to aid our project – lets go through the main features one by one.

To-Do Lists:

Create multiple to-to lists to get things done, and ensure you never miss something that you need to do. This feature of Basecamp is great!

We can create multiple to-do lists and if needed, assign work to members. For instance, I created a general to-do list and created a new to-do called pre-launch PR – and then assigned this to Mark. So when log’s in, he will see the new task in the project (you can also notify by email for urgent tasks). Once a to-do is done, it can be ticked off and it disappears from your dashboard.

Time Tracking in Basecamp

The great thing about Basecamp is the time tracking feature on the to-do lists. Every time you need to log your time, its just a simple clickety-click on the timer and just input the time spent on a particular project. Basecamp will also aggregate time across multiple projects to produce comprehensive reports – which can be customised, per person, per project etc.

It would be nice to have some sort of timer available for PC users to start and stop your time – but this is only available for Mac users at present.

Document Sharing in Basecamp – letting the side down!

Having shared documents is great, but this is Basecamps weakest feature compared to the other shoplifted sites. There’s no check in/out feature, which means it’s possible to have two or more people editing the same document, and some changes are lost.

Basecamp doesn’t support in browser editing either like BT does (although BT has browser issues!) – no big issue, just create a temp Basecamp folder to save a re-upload documents. At present, Basecamp does not give document folders, instead opting for a naming system. So thing like website reports are all categorised as web reports, instead of being able to place these in one specific folder.

One good thing about Basecamp document sharing is that it stores a document history (up to 10 revisions of past uploads) – so if you make a mistake, tracking back is easy (not that we make mistake’s at Eviser!).

Posting Messages in Basecamp

Another cool feature of most online solutions is a mini message board. Just a simple post and reply to a message feature which does away with emailing and copying people in to them. This is especially useful for tracking back on message history.

Collaboration at Basecamp

Collaboration seems to be Basecamps buzz word. This basically means letting multiple people have access to the project, so clients, staff, sub-contactors can all sing from the same hymn sheet – and when managing a large project with multiple people involved – this is a God send!

All in all Basecamp works extremely well for us – it has it flaws like most other applications, but the people behind Basecamp seem very pro-active and are moving the software forward – which is good.

Basecamp has a free version available – without some of the features I have talked about, but this will give you a good feel for the software.

If you use Basecamp as a result of this post – then drop me a line at benellis@eviser.co.uk and let me know what you think.

www.basecamphq.com

p.s. Please mention “eviser” in the referral code option on the sign-up form!