Basecamp

Basecamp allows me to have all my tasks and team communication in one place. Without the need to spend extra money for different tools .

Vorteile

As a driving instructor I have a need to record all my student and classes. Basecamp give me the opportunity to follow up all active tasks and deadlines.

Nachteile

It is a little bit tricky for students to work easy with the tool when day meet it for the first time.

Overall, I love the way it feels like a virtual headquarters for your company where employees can chat, stay up to date with projects, and post all related docs and files, and integrate schedules, but in order to get the best experience with running an office remotely there is such limitation and little customization available. This is a great start, but you still need to use other tools to get a comprehensive set of tools to run and operate your business.

Vorteile

I love the fact that basecamp feels like a virtual office. The dashboard looks like virtual rooms that one can enter depending on the department you want to access. Basecamp has many features to make it feel like you're at the office like the different departments with access to files, chat, project management , to-do's, groups, and a link to schedule your time and tasks and keep track of meetings.

Nachteile

There is very little customization that can be done besides adding a company logo, and setting up your departments, groups and selecting which features to incorporate into the department tiles. I would love to be able to custom colorize the look and feel to make it more unique and visual, but there are limitations. Each tile that can be used for departments or projects, also have very little room for customization and you're not able to create any unique features besides your standard to dos, schedule, chat, and files.

We felt that the "all in one" nature of the software was great, but beyond our initial tests we found it lacking in adaptability to fitting into the way WE work, (it wants you to wholly adopt their approach and we felt that there was an internal resistance to that development style) - therefore we abandoned the platform and looked for alternatives.

Vorteile

For years we have been looking for an all in one project and task management system to use with our business. And BaseCamp is so nearly it, it has most of the features you'd expect but presents them in a different way to most other task tracking systems.

On the positive side, it's easy to use, friendly to the eye and everything is where it should be. It has some nifty features that you can easily become over-reliant on that aren't present in other management software tools. One recent addition was the Hill Chart where you plot a task on an "planning hill" - in a really visual way. This is totally unique and works well, helping you quickly identify the progress of any given task.

As a project manager, this is a very useful way of seeing where everything currently "is at"

Nachteile

Onto the Cons: For us, we found that the software was too verbose in its approach, it has a work log system where each user is expected to fill in a diary of what they have done today - sure, this can be switched off in the options, but the regularity of BaseCamp e-mailing you is far too high as a default. By default you're constantly managing e-mails from the system (which is precisely what is is meant to eliminate!)

Once you disable these notifications, we felt that the software starts to lose its impact, our staff started to drift away from it over time and went back to other task tracking methods (such as trello) for different areas of the development. This caused us to reconsider the entire enterprise and look for alternatives, our team just couldn't seem to adopt the (very rigid) way that Basecamp wants you to work.

Our overall experience has been great. We were using a custom-built tool for team communication, but ultimately decided that Basecamp just has more features and will save us a lot of cash in the long run versus building the tool ourselves. It's nice that there is a flat charge for the service, instead of charging by the user like some other services do. This saves us a considerable amount of money.

Vorteile

It was very easy to setup and get going. We just invited our team members in with each of their email addresses and it handled the rest. Our entire team found it easy to create their account or do a social login.

We use it primarily as a message board and chat system on our team. I really like how the entire message board is searchable, which is useful for finding things later on. "Remember when we talked about XYZ", and you can just search for XYZ and it shows up quickly. The calendar and file sharing has also come in handy for simple things, though it's not as robust as using something like Google Calendar or Google Drive.

Basecamp also has a useful API that we've used to pull some data out of their system and display it in our other systems.

The mobile app works great. It's probably one of the best designed apps I've ever used, to be honest. It makes it easy to talk with the team while on-the-go.

Nachteile

I was hoping for some kind of wiki system to be included with Basecamp. You can kinda make up your own wiki using specific categories on the message board and file sharing, but it's not quite the same. A wiki would be really helpful for internal documentation.

Good if you feel everyone needs to be hand-held on your time, and can't learn systems with a bit more horsepower and slightly less of a layman's interface.

Vorteile

It technically does what is supposed to -- manage tasks and keep people in sync -- if you don't mind spending lots of time doing it.

Nachteile

Basecamp is supposed to be one of those products you're supposed to love. After all, it's the source of Ruby on Rails, and DHH, et. We found it to be clunky and obtrusive -- a task update should take seconds, and multiple task updates should not be able to be done in bulk / faster -- and yet that's not the case with basecamp -- it's almost like the design objective was simply -- hey you should love the process of task management, and so let's make all that process management take lots of time.