Basecamp pisses me off occasionally
We’ve been using 37 Signals’ Basecamp to write documents for the last couple of weeks at the Telegraph. All in all it’s a great product, but there are a few things that are really annoying.
For example, when someone writes a comment on a Writeboard that you created or contributed to you don’t get a notification by email, and there’s no way to subscribe to one either.
In fact, Writeboards are very much a second-class citizen in Basecamp. They’re hosted on another site, and because of the way the authentication works between them, the back button quite often ends up just redirecting you back to the same Writeboard again. The Writeboard itself has a URL, but that’s not the URL you should use to share it.
Writeboards are incredibly useful, don’t get me wrong, but they should definitely be better integrated. It would also be very useful if you could export them to PDF or Word format.
I’d probably not mention this, except that 37 Signals are really quite cocky about how usable their software is and how carefully they think things like this through. I wish they’d spend less time showing off, and more sorting issues like these out.
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3 Responses to “Basecamp pisses me off occasionally”
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I totally agree. Basecamp sucks in project management too. What am I supposed to do with 20 project IDs if I try to manage 20 projects? But that’s not all! The reall nightmare starts when you get a client with another Basecamp account. All these issues and many more forced me to switch to Wrike http://www.wrike.com/ and now I’m quite happy with it. The team and clients love the tool, I get reports and Gantt charts. Sweet!
I can’t say that I have any desire for Gantt charts whatsoever, and we’ve not (yet) got enough projects for any of the other issues to become a problem. As I said, I think Basecamp is a great product - it just has one or two things that are irritating occasionally.
Gannt charts - shmant charts…
37 signals’ customer service practices drive me nuts. Wrike seems to be the latest hot product on the block but I don’t find it incredible useful. I’m with OnStage now - http://www.OnStagePortal.com similar to basecamp, but way friendlier customer service.