King & McGaw Developers

We’re big fans of Basecamp here at Easyart. It’s very close to replacing email for our internal discussions. Here’s what we like:

• It’s open. I might have a discussion with one person, but others can be aware of what’s going on by overhearing the discussion in the project or in the daily recap. It’s also easy to see who is over subscribed.
• Distance is less important. We have two sites, numerous people that work from home, and a number of contractors. Using Basecamp is our primary means of communication makes collaboration more effective no matter where you are located.
• It’s incredibly simple and fun to use. It does a small amount of things – to-dos, text documents, discussions, files – really well (we use Google for calendars). I had been meaning to write an internal document on how to use Basecamp but it has never been necessary!
• It’s totally usable by email only. Some of our busier people use it purely through email, while others use a combination of online and email.

A few things would make it even more useful:

• Mentions. Sometimes the amount of email Basecamp generates is overwhelming, and unless you are assigned to a task you might never know that someone is waiting for a response from you.
• A proper CalDAV calendar. We need to be able to create events from other apps and devices if the calendar is going to be useful for us.
• A way to “loop in” other collaborators into a task or discussion, on the site. The only way to do this at the moment is to loop them in on email only.
• Chat integration. We switched from Campfire to Flowdock back in March, but because most of the action is now in Basecamp, we don’t use chat as much. It would be nice to be able to send one-liners in Basecamp without starting new discussions.