The New Basecamp, A Brief Evaluation

I’ve been using Base­camp from 37 Sig­nals for over 7 years now. Base­camp is a cloud-based project man­age­ment pro­gram. The clas­sic ver­sion of Base­camp had a sim­ple inter­face that con­sist­ed of Mes­sages, To Dos, Mile­stones & Files. It offered time track­ing of task, to-do tem­plates, adding com­ments relat­ed to a mes­sage, to do or file, adding file attache­ments to projects and more. The bot­tom line, Base­camp Clas­sic made it much eas­i­er to work on projects and keep things orga­nized. The main com­po­nent Base­camp Clas­sic was miss­ing was a good fol­low up and reminder sys­tem. I had to be reli­gious to review my dai­ly email agen­da and projects in order not to for­get a next step. This was get­ting to be a very frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence, and I began to hunt around for a bet­ter project man­age­ment pro­gram. Then, out of the blue, 37 Sig­nals released what they called ​“The New Base­camp.” The New Basecamp [cap­tion id=“attachment_1573” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Click to Enlarge”][/​caption] I jumped to the New Base­camp one last time think­ing I’d be dis­ap­point­ed and still be on the hunt for a bet­ter pro­gram. To my amaze­ment, I was hooked! Why? The New Base­camp actu­al­ly has a more sim­ple user inter­face. It renamed a few of their core items and pro­vid­ed the best thing of all: reminder emails! I can now cre­ate an event on a mar­ket­ing cal­en­dar and get a reminder 30 min­utes before that event starts and the day before so I can do any last minute prepa­ra­tions for that event. I can also assign an event to some­one else on the team or who has access to my project, and they will get the reminders. The to do items are also added to the project cal­en­dar. The new Base­camp is so sim­ple, any­one can get the hang of it in no time at all. What The New Base­camp Does Not Do It is not a full scale project man­age­ment pro­gram like Microsoft Project. In oth­er words, you can­not track time or pro­duce gantt charts. If that is what you are look­ing for, def­i­nite­ly check out Smartsheets. You will not be dis­ap­point­ed (I’ll do anoth­er blog post on Smartsheets soon). You will not be able to edit spread­sheets or have a two way sync with MS or Google prod­ucts. It is a stand alone web based pro­gram. Cur­rent­ly, the New Base­camp is also lack­ing mobile access for cer­tain smart­phones. Yes you can access it from an iPad, but it is not user friend­ly. If you have an Android there is an App for that, but while writ­ing this blog, no iPhone app is avail­able. 37 Sig­nals told me they are work­ing on it. Why Should You Con­sid­er Basecamp [cap­tion id=“attachment_1574” align=“alignright” width=“300” caption=“Click to Enlarge”][/​caption] If you are a con­trac­tor, I think Smartsheets is def­i­nite­ly some­thing you should con­sid­er. Every­one else who needs to man­age mul­ti­ple projects in one place, or need feed­back from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent peo­ple (in and out of your com­pa­ny) Base­camp is the way to go. It will def­i­nite­ly keep you orga­nized and on track. For exam­ple, my church is doing a ten­ant improve­ment (TI) in Fred­er­ick MD this year. I have been in charge of a num­ber of aspects of this project, which involved com­mu­ni­cat­ing with 15 – 20 church mem­bers who were also involved in this project. We were using email to go back and forth on col­or ideas, engi­neer­ing, sound, floor types and much much more. When I took over as the project man­ag­er for the build­ing project, I decid­ed to use Base­camp because I knew it would be easy to train oth­ers how to use it. I was able to cre­ate a num­ber of projects such as ​“Fin­ish­ing Com­mit­tee” ​“Design Com­mit­tee” ​“Sound Com­mit­tee” and ​“Build­ing Cen­tral.” I also invit­ed our inte­ri­or design­er and con­trac­tor into Base­camp when they were need­ed. I was able to cre­ate a task list of items I want­ed in the final pro­pos­al and had the con­trac­tor check them all off when he put them into the bid. I assigned task to the design­er for things like, ​“Help choose a tile and col­or for Foy­er (May 25^th). She would then receive a noti­fi­ca­tion about the task and was able to cor­re­spond with me until the task was com­plet­ed. All in all, it has allowed for great com­mu­ni­ca­tion and a clean paper trail. The new Base­camp is a sim­ple and easy to use project man­age­ment pro­gram that is worth the price. $20 a month gets you 10 projects and unlim­it­ed users. They have all sorts of plans and great tech­ni­cal sup­port. You can sign up for a free 45 day tri­al. If you do, let me know how you like it.