The Best Software You're Not Using

Basecamp from 37Signals in Chicago, is simply a fantastic piece of software. Offered as an inexpensive hosted web application, Basecamp allows you to manage multiple projects within your browser. You can share files, calendar and communication with team members from a single location.

At Fellowship, our communications/graphics team uses Basecamp to track hundreds of projects. Each designer can view his or her task list and continually update each project. You can also provide access to contractors and vendors. The project manager can then view a high level status report of open work. If you want to take it to an even higher level, you can subscribe to a RSS feed to track updates to your projects.

Basecamp is simple and intuitive to use. 37Signals spends a great deal of time and energy on making elegant software, software that does what it needs to do and no more. But one fact stands above all others:

Basecamp gets used.

How often do you purchase and install software, set it in front of your users, and sit back and watch it gather dust? Basecamp is the exact opposite. From the first day, our use has continued to grow and expand into new areas.

37Signals makes it easy to give Basecamp a try. Take a few minutes to discover what you're missing.

Comments

[Jason Fried]

Thanks for the kind words, Brian! We're constantly improving Basecamp so stay tuned for an even better product.

[A former Singlefile User]

One pretty severe warning: make sure you have some control over your Basecamp data in case the site goes away. As a user of one of 37signals’ previous products, Singlefile, I had over 3000 book records in their database. At a certain point, their export function ceased working for me. I alerted them to the issue, but the problem wasn’t fixed. Then they took down the site two months later…

From an outside perspective (they have refused to address the issue, nor followed through on their promise to get me a copy of my data, over 6 months after the issue first occured), it looked like the product simply didn’t scale to this number of records. But their customer service response has been pretty dire. This was the last message I received from their main contact, Jason, back in early March:

“At this time exporting a single person’s data for a service that is no longer available, was run for free over the past year, and isn’t even on a machine that can facilitate the export is simply not at the top of our list.”

Which you might imagine was incredibly annoying, since the export of the data had already been requested well before the site was shut down. It’s also not a stellar example of responsive customer service and the transparency they mention on their Basecamp Manifesto. Argh…

[A former Singlefile User]

Note: the issue with my Singlefile data has been resolved satisfactorily and amicably.