I’ve got ad-hoc solutions for my project management needs, but they’re not ideal. My bugtracker (mantis) is being asked to perform increasingly unnatural acts. I still haven’t learned to love iCal (it syncs with my PDA and iPod, so I live with it). I dabbled with an OmniOutliner version of painless software schedules and early versions of PMX, but never sustained their use beyond scoping and pricing a project (helpful nevertheless). My wiki (‘Tavi) has been running for a year or so, though, and that’s working out okay.
Basecamp is an elegant, powerful, web-based project management tool
. It’s a hosted service priced at between $19 and $59 per month.
[…] It lets you and your clients keep your conversations, contacts, reviews, schedules, to-do lists, and more in one place — password protected and accessible from any computer. Plus, since Basecamp looks, feels, and works like a blog, it’s a breeze to use.
That’s assuming you know how a blog looks, feels, and works.
Reading the marketing bumph, Basecamp sounds nifty. It’s developed by the folks at 37signals so it looks pleasing too. There’s not much information on how it supports teams and roles, I think I’ll have to take it for a spin (you can use it free for one active project, but have to supply credit card details).
Published at 2:29 am on February 5th, 2004.
Topics: Software
8 Comments
“you can use it free for one active project, but have to supply credit card details” — actually, the free 1-project plan doesn’t require a credit card. http://www.basecampHQ.com
Comment by Jason Fried at 4:28 am on February 5th, 2004 #link
Jason, thanks for pointing that out. I missed the link to the free 1-project plan sign-up page (https://secure.basecamphq.com/signup/Free).
Comment by Tim at 10:35 am on February 5th, 2004 #link
Yeah, I heard the hype too. Tried it out and wasn’t all that thrilled. After further research I think I found “The One”. I Just took a demo of Infowit Creative Manager’s project management software it does all the same thing Basecamp does and then some, evertyhing you need to run a creative business. Good Luck
Comment by Sam B. at 6:33 pm on February 8th, 2004 #link
Sam B: Wow! Infowit’s Creative Manager’s project management software makes the coffee too‽ I signed up to Basecamp on their free trial; I’ll report back here with a little review after I’ve tried it out for a while.
Comment by Tim at 12:20 am on February 9th, 2004 #link
You’re missing the point. Basecamp is great because you can actually use it. These other tools may be full of features (more than most need - like MS Word), but they are confusing, ugly, and not streamlined. All the features in the world don’t add up to a good experience. Only something you can use and understand equals that.
Comment by Carl at 3:47 pm on February 21st, 2004 #link
I wonder if Carl is actually Jason Fried (the developer of BaseCamp) in disguise?
Comment by Kevin Owens at 4:08 am on June 25th, 2004 #link
If you are interested in simple a simple project management & extranet tool then check out Hot Project (www.hotproject.com)
It is probably stronger as an extranet as it allows PDF and PSD thumbnail creation but it has fairly decent task and calendar management.
Comment by Claerwen at 10:12 am on August 20th, 2005 #link
There are a lot of Mantis users who are also using dotProject (http://www.dotproject.net/) as well and they seem to be happy with it. There are modules that integrate them together.
By the way, the new website for Mantis is http://www.mantisbt.org.
Comment by Victor Boctor at 9:34 am on December 23rd, 2006 #link