Basecamp Adds a Calendar Function to iPhone App

When I use a prod­uct longer than a year, it must be good! I am always on the look­out for qual­i­ty, cloud-based pro­grams that work well for small busi­ness­es. Base­camp, by 37 Sig­nals, is one of those pro­grams that I’ve used for close to a decade now. I do have a laun­dry list of things I’d like to add to Base­cam­p’s func­tion­al­i­ty, but in the mean­time, I am con­tent with the cur­rent tools and fea­tures with­in Base­camp. I have hunt­ed for the per­fect project man­age­ment tool and I keep com­ing back to Base­camp! It just works!

Cal­en­dar & Me Features

In this post, I want­ed to update my read­ers on the lat­est func­tion that was added to the iPhone App: Cal­en­dar and ​“Me” Tabs. Before this update, you could still view the cal­en­dar indi­vid­u­al­ly with­in each project and the drop­down menu called ​“Upcom­ing Events.” This is still pos­si­ble, but the new update makes it faster and eas­i­er to view, cre­ate and edit events. Oh before the new release, one could not edit a Cal­en­dar, just view events! You also have access to all cal­en­dars from all projects.

The ​“Me” sec­tion gives you a list of all the To Dos and Events assigned to you per­son­al­ly. This not a fea­ture I use all that much since I tend to use Base­camp to fol­low up on oth­er peo­ple more than myself, but it still is a nice thing to have for indi­vid­u­als. It helps cut through all the clutter.

Base­camp can be very over­whelm­ing for those who are not used to run­ning and man­ag­ing projects. They look at it and are over­whelmed. For those who are employ­ees, I’d encour­age them to just use the ME tab and not freak out about all the oth­er items they see in their project(s). Leave all the oth­er things to the managers.

Keep Cer­tain Sec­tions Private

Until recent­ly, every­thing on Base­camp was open to all users. If you were hav­ing a bad day and typed a com­ment that was a bit too crit­i­cal, every­one would see it. I don’t know why it took this long to add a pri­va­cy area, but to me, this is the most impor­tant update that makes Base­camp a very valu­able tool to use even more with your cus­tomers (espe­cial­ly if you are a con­trac­tor). Now when you invite a person(s) to your Base­camp project, you add them as an employ­ee or client. If you add some­one as a client, you can turn off cer­tain sec­tions that will remain pri­vate only to you and your employees.

Base­camp for Contractors?

Are you using Base­camp in your orga­ni­za­tion? How do you cur­rent­ly use it? I would love to know via email or in the com­ments below. Base­camp is a great way to impress your cus­tomers while run­ning their project: for a 1 day project or an entire remod­el. You can cre­ate tem­plates for jobs and have your employ­ees check off all the impor­tant items relat­ed to their job. It has been proven that com­pa­nies that have a check sys­tem for their jobs have few­er mis­takes and a hap­pi­er cus­tomers! I have helped set­up Base­camp for con­trac­tors and paint­ing companies.

I will warn you: your employ­ees will balk when you inte­grate Base­camp into your orga­ni­za­tion. It is new. It is dif­fer­ent. Don’t let that stop you. I’ve set this up for my dad’s paint­ing com­pa­ny in San Diego and start­ed with 1 employ­ee at a time. It works great! My dad can now check in on any job and make sure his crew lead­ers are hit­ting the mark every time.