At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this week in Boston, I had the pleasure of seeing a lot of interesting new companies and products. Video camera in tow, I captured elevator pitches with half a dozen of them: Newsgator, Tomoye, Yakabod, Joyent, nGenera, Box.net and qTask. Here is the E2 elevator pitch extravaganza.

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Just a quick heads up that we recently turned off the ability to post comments to the blog. It’s a temporary measure, which was necessitated by the fact that our site was hacked (via SQL injection) through the commenting system. Our web team is in the process of addressing the problem, and we’ll have comments turned back on shortly.

And while I have the podium, I’d like to congratulate our blogger-in-chief, Steve Wylie, who welcomed a new son into his family last night! Steve and his family are doing great, and he’ll be back on the blogging circuit soon. Way to go, Steve!

I wanted to give a quick (and belated) heads up to our readers that Steve Tedjamulia, who has been a regular blogger on CL since the beginning of the year, landed a new job a few weeks ago. Tedjamulia had been a Collaboration Architect for Novell, but he recently joined Collanos as the Head of Product Management and Strategy. Collanos is developing a cross-platform team collaboration application which just went into beta. You can try out the free application (don’t worry, the basic level of the application will remain free after it exits beta) at the Collanos web site.  Congratulations, Steve.

This week Business Week magazine announced the winners of its "Best of the Web 2006" awards, as voted on by the magazine’s readers and editorial staff.  I was happy to see a category for "Collaboration", and even happier to see that two products I recently reviewed here on CL were named winners. Here are the winners…

1. Wikipedia
2. Central Desktop*
3. JotSpot
4. Basecamp
5. SourceForge
6. eJamming*
7. scanR
8. Zimbio*
9. SocialText

(The ones with asterisks were apparently write-ins.)

It’s good to see excellent team workspaces like Central Desktop, Basecamp, JotSpot and SocialText getting their due.  The magazine also gave awards out for the best web mail, blogging tools, calling, photo sharing, and more.  Here’s the full article…

At Interop New York last week, Ross Mayfield (CEO, Socialtext) and Andrew McAfee (Associate Professor, Harvard Business School) delivered a tag-team keynote address about Web 2.0 applications and their potential for organizations.  Mayfield took the opportunity to debut Socialtext 2.0, which looks like it has a lot of great new features while keeping the interface simple and approachable.  (I’ll be reviewing it very soon.) 

But it was McAfee’s portion of the keynote that stimulated the deep thinking for me. He made an observation about team collaboration that crystalized a concept I’ve observed.  It revolves around the notion of a "long tail" of collaborators, and it has wide-ranging implications for both the developers and users of collaborative software. 

Read on — I’ve got a video of the keynote that’s worth your time.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of the long tail, I’ll simply direct you to Chris Andersen’s explanation (he’s Wired’s Editor-in-Chief — he wrote a book on the subject).  As this concept relates to collaboration, Andrew McAfee pointed to Wikipedia.  He noted that Wikipedia is very successful, and has millions of entries and is widely read and referenced.  But contributions to Wikipedia come from a very, very small portion of the the people who come to the site. We’re not talking about the 80-20 rule here — it’s more like a 99-1 ratio of users to contributors.  I’ve read that Digg has a similarly small ratio of contributors whose posts make it to Digg’s front page (making the front page indicates that those stories are the most popular content on the site).  

For sites like Wikipedia and Digg, the fact that a small percentage of users generates the most valuable content is not a problem, since the number of visitors to these sites is so large.  If only one percent of Wikipedia or Digg users are regular contributors, that still represents hundreds or perhaps thousands of people contributing.  At the end of a "long tail" of their site traffic, where you find the most prolific and popular contributors, Digg and Wikipedia have enough people to sustain their content needs.

But what if you are dealing with a much smaller population of users?  For instance, say you have a team workspace for 10, 20, or even 100 people to exchange project information, post files, and so on. If the notion of the long tail is scaled down to a smaller population of users, that might mean that you can only count on a few people (or none) to regularly contribute to the workspace.  I have seen this effect before, and I’d wager that you have too.  How do you break people from their email habit and get them to contribute to a potentially better process — but better only if enough people on the team chip in?  Do managers step in with some sort of carrot-and-stick approach?

McAfee said that "bridging" — technology/features that support the old and new way of doing things — is one way to encourage more user contributions.  For instance, Socialtext 2.0 supports email in/out from the workspace, so you don’t have to ditch email - you can send an email to a special email address designated for your workspace, and it will capture and catalog them. That creates a "bridge" that lets users who are more comfortable with email continue to use it and contribute to the group workspace.  What if group workspaces took it to the next level and started adding hooks for various vendors’ ERP and CRM systems?  Maybe those bridges would help even more.

If you have any strategies that you’ve used (successfully or not) to encourage your team to use collaborative software, I’m curious to hear about them. If there’s a long enough tail of CL readers who contribute stories, I’ll post them in a future blog entry.  :)

In the meantime, here’s the Mayfield/McAfee keynote from Interop New York last week, in its entirety.  Great stuff.

Following my review of 37Signals’ Basecamp a couple of weeks ago, I now turn to one of its competitors: Central Desktop.  Central Desktop is also a hosted team workspace which targets the same type of users as Basecamp, at around the same price point. Unlike Basecamp, though, Central Desktop’s developers have packed tons of features and options into the product. Does it stack up to Basecamp?  Read on and find out.

Central Desktop

Central Desktop, Inc.
100 North Lake Avenue, #205
Pasadena, CA 91101
Tel: 626-593-7007
info@centraldesktop-inc.com

Like Basecamp, Central Desktop is a hosted team workspace that you work with entirely through a web browser, but it’s fairly different from Basecamp once you get dig into it.  Central Desktop is based on wiki technology, with significant functionality layered on top.  It uses AJAX technology, so like Basecamp, it reacts quickly to user input and feels like a Web 2.0 application.

While both Basecamp and Central Desktop were designed to enable team communication and project collaboration, it’s clear the two companies have different product development philosophies.  37Signals (the maker of Basecamp) takes a minimalist approach, whereas Central Desktop is packed with features and adds more regularly.  Depending on which side of that line you fall, you’ll either love Central Desktop or feel it’s over engineered, as I’ll explain.

How It Works

Central Desktop is based around "Workspaces" (Basecamp calls them "Projects").  A Workspace is where all of the files, data and communications for a project live. Central Desktop supports four types of Workspaces:

1. Team Workspace. This type of Workspace is the closest to a Basecamp project. It is designed for users who aren’t necessarily all employed by the same company, and who don’t want or mind whether a company owns the Workspace. The Workspace is owned by the individual who plunked down his/her credit card for the service.

2. Company Workspace. Company Workspaces are for businesses that want additional security (SSL access) and want ownership over the data in the Workspace. Company Workspaces ensure that the content within the workspace stay with the company.  Basecamp does not offer special company plans like this.

3. Public Workspace. A Public Workspace is an ungated Workspace that is open to anyone on the web. There is no username or password required for users to access the Public Workspace. Basecamp doesn’t support ungated Projects, so this is a differentiator.

4. Personal Workspace. This is a hidden area that only you can see.  Basecamp doesn’t support personal Projects (unless you’re the administrator and you set other permissions accordingly), so this is another differentiator.

Setup

Central Desktop has some standard templates for various types of projects that help you get off on the right foot. When you create a new workspace, it prompts you to create either a public workspace (i.e., open to anyone without a login – essentially a website) or a private workspace. If you select a private workspace (which is what I concentrated on for this review), you can choose one of six different types of workspaces: "general team collaboration", "manage a project", "central desktop library", "department or team intranet", "coordinate an event", or a blank workspace that you can configure yourself.  (See image, below.)

The Workspace creation wizard helps you get started.

Features

Central Desktop also handles file version control (see image, below). Whereas Basecamp supports versioning with its Writeboard collaborative writing application, Central Desktop uses a file manager with a check-in/check-out system that tracks revision histories for documents, and prevents others from making changes while you have a file checked out.  As with other version control systems, it does leave the door open to problems if someone forgets to check a file back in – it won’t be editable until that happens.  Central Desktop also shows the percentage that a document changed during each revision, which let me quickly locate when major edits were made to a document, and who made those changes.

The File Manager lets you store files, and manages them with a check in/out system. You have the option to post a note to colleagues when you’ve checked something out, which helps with team communication.  

If you often upload a large number of files, Central Desktop has a "File Drop Zone" mini application: a small browser window that you leave open in one corner of your desktop, that you can drag and drop files onto for quick uploads.  I found it helpful when uploading a bunch of files that were scattered all over, but otherwise I typically used the standard "upload new file" form.

Notes. Notes are similar to Writeboards in Basecamp: editable web pages that others can make changes to as well. Notes support more formatting options than Writeboards, though — there’s an editing toolbar that lets you format text, add tables, add file attachments, and even dig into the HTML formatting of the note.  Like the File Manager, Notes are versioned, and you can track changes in a side-by-side view of two versions.  

Discussions.  Discussions are threaded conversation between your team members. Team members can optionally be notified when conversations are started and when others reply via email. A nice feature that goes beyond Basecamp is that you can reply to a Discussion notification via email and have it posted to your site, too.  (Basecamp sends you an email that contains the message, but you have to go back to your Basecamp site to reply.)

Tasks. Tasks are assignable to-do lists for project teams and workgroups, like Basecamp’s To-Dos. Unlike Basecamp, other people can make comments under each task, which is a nice feature to have.  However, the default view of the task list collapses comments under the task name, so you might not know that comments are even there. (See below.)

Milestones. Milestones are project goals, made up of tasks.  Milestones can be assigned to people.  As the tasks that make up the milestone are completed, a thermometer gauge shows your increasing progress towards the milestone completion.

Calendar. The Central Desktop Calendar lets you get more granular with events than Basecamp’s Milestones. Basecamp Milestones are only day-long events, so you can’t set an event for a particular time – making it impractical for scheduling meetings.  Central Desktop’s Calendar does not have this restriction, and functions as a calendar like that within Outlook. Events like meetings and calls can be scheduled at specific times.  Calendar events can also be set to recur, can be added to your Outlook calendar, and can be marked private so people outside your company cannot see them. 

But get this: Central Desktop suffers from the opposite problem as Basecamp. You cannot schedule a day-long event in the calendar. If you want to put a birthday, vacation day, or multi-day meeting on the calendar, you have to specify a start and end time. You could get around this by putting a day-long event into the calendar as a Milestone, but that’s a poor workaround and wouldn’t work for a multi-day event.

Image Gallery.  This is a really stripped down application, which I didn’t care for.  You can see thumbnails of all your uploaded images, and when you click on them, you get full size version and view your image captions. But strangely, neither captions nor file names are shown below the thumbnails, so it’s hard to direct someone else to review a specific image in the gallery.  The good news is that as a fallback, Central Desktop’s file manager offers the same type of functionality for categorizing and viewing images as Basecamp’s file manager.  So just use that instead.

Databases (in beta).  I found this feature to be one of the slicker aspects of Central Desktop.  You can one create from scratch, or upload data from an Excel file, and make the database accessible to your team.  I was easily able to create a member directories by copying and pasting data from an Excel worksheet into a blank web form text box, and Central Desktop took care of the rest. Below you can see the default input form for creating a personnel directory. 

And here’s the interface once you have some data in:

I did encounter some problems when trying to create a new view of data – sorting names by company rather than person’s name.  I also had problems when using the search engine to find data – it would locate records, and display the search results, but it wouldn’t let me view the records, saying that the workspace had been either moved or deleted.  This was the case (I had performed various tasks, including renaming some Workspaces, a day or two earlier), but I think the search engine should resynchronize so it finds the data at its new location.  

Project Status Report.  Like the Workspace Dashboard, this gives you a high-level view of the status of your project goals, milestones and tasks (see image, below). You can filter items by whether they’ve been completed or not, to get an idea of what things need to get done, and how overdue they are.  I felt that there was a high level of duplicity in the Project Status Report and the Workspace homepage, which also shows you what’s overdue, and by how many days.  This is one feature I think Central Desktop could lose and not be significantly harmed.

The Project Status Report. It lets you filter complete and incomplete milestones  and tasks to get various views of your project’s status.  Much of this kind of data is presented in the Dashboard already, though.

This is a fairly basic web meeting tool that lets you set up a conference bridge line (not toll free) with others and do some desktop sharing with the host.  (The host must use IE, but invitees can use another browser as long as they install separate client. It only supports Windows.)  It’s a nice little addition if you don’t already have a more robust conferencing tool, but nothing fantastic.

{mospagebreak}

Functionality

Data Access. Central Desktop goes to great lengths to give users an idea of what’s going on inside Workspaces, which I found very helpful.  Whereas Basecamp takes a "publish" perspective by relying on users to notify others of changes via email, Central Desktop takes a "subscribe" approach – you tell it what you want to be notified about.  You can subscribe to site updates in various ways:

•    The Central Desktop Sidebar. This is a floating window that is constantly updated to show you who changed which project files most recently, indicate when people joined the workspace, when messages were posted, and so on. (Unfortunately it’s neither dockable nor can it be set to be always on top of other windows.)  You can see the Sidebar in the image below.

•    You can get an RSS of this project information, or an iCal feed of a Workspace calendar.  

•    You can have a digest of changes made to any particular Workspace emailed to you at regular intervals (every 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours, daily, etc.).  Here’s what the digest emails look like:

Emails from Central Desktop  can keep you updated on the goings-on with your Workspaces.

There is currently no API for Central Desktop. If you want to write custom apps that tie into your Central Desktop data, this might be a minus for you.  But Central Desktop is planning to release an API in 2007. 

Unlike Basecamp, there is no time tracking feature to keep track of hours you’ve spent on different projects for clients. 

Central Desktop makes it fairly easy to extract info from your Workspace. You can download a zip that contains subfolders with databases, files, images.  Database can also individually be exported as CSV files. It didn’t seem to download messages. Overall, however, data extraction is better supported than Basecamp.

In addition to creating private Workspaces, you can create ones that are open to the public. However, I again was confused by Central Desktop’s permissions in this area.  I anticipated that by "public", it would be usable by anyone without having to invite them. (Otherwise what’s the difference between it and a private Workspace?)  But while I could view the homepage of the public site I created, I couldn’t access the database, discussion forums, and other areas of the site. It said I didn’t have permissions to do so.

Note that because users can create new Workspaces when you invite them into one of your own, that leaves the door open to the possibility that they would create a public Workspace without your knowledge.  I doubt any of my colleagues, clients or contractors would have the nerve to create a publicly viewable Central Desktop Workspace on my account to publicize their band’s upcoming tour dates, but if that’s a concern of yours, be forewarned that it’s possible. If you don’t want to give someone an account for your Workspace, you can enable allow individual files to be sent via email and encrypted URLs.  This is a more granular permissions level than Basecamp allows, and one that’s often necessary in my experience.  (It can also be turned off by the administrator, if you’re worried about sharing data outside the company.) 

SSL security is available for Company Workspaces, one of the higher subscriptions levels (they start at $132/month).

A nice feature is the ability to clone a project you have already set up so that you don’t have to recreate all its settings again.  This can be great for recurring projects like newsletters, which have many of the same categories, milestone types, members and permissions, and so on.

{mospagebreak}

My Reaction

Overall, I found Central Desktop very feature rich and flexible.  As a Basecamp user, I was surprised at the number of features and options it contains.

Central Desktop is likely best for companies that work on a variety of projects and need a number of different project tools to accomplish them. In terms of feature support, it’s definitely more powerful than Basecamp. However, because it contains so many features, it struggles to provide quick access to tools/data, and can’t always present the same streamlined interface as Basecamp. I think over time, users would get used to this aspect of Central Desktop, but I also believe that it would have some of my colleagues scratching their heads.  I believe it would be better suited to left-brained, tech-savvy teams.

I take Central Desktop to task for its Help system, which I found lacking.  For a product with so many features and options, I think a robust help system is critical.  Several times when I had questions about functionality, I clicked on the Help link at the top, and was brought to a page with some short training videos.  The videos are, but no substitute for a searchable and indexed user manual.  Then I tried to use the search bar on the help page, but found that it wasn’t getting me anywhere – obvious search terms like "milestone" came up without search results. I later discovered that the search bar, even on the help page, only searches your content – not the help database – even when you specify that you want to search both the help forums and your own Workspace content.  A product this deep with features should make help documentation readily available.

I had some issues the search engine too.  While there are some great aspects to the search engine (such as indexing the contents of your uploaded documents), it has some serious quirks.  For instance, it can’t find files by their file names.  I later discovered that the period in filenames trips it up – it can’t find "jetairplane.jpg", but it can find "jetairplane".  I confirmed with the company that this was a bug, and that they will work on it.

To give credit where it’s definitely due, Central Desktop has very good support forums.  Questions are answered very quickly and problems and bugs are often resolved the same day, if not same hour.

Initially I found Central Desktop more confusing to use than Basecamp.  Granted, I have more experience with Basecamp, so that is to be expected.  But there were certain aspects of Central Desktop, such as dueling permissions at the Workspace and individual level, which seem more complex than they need to be.  I think Central Desktop would benefit from some feature and interface refinements.  

I like how customizable it is.  You can configure the content of the toolbars to your heart’s content, using pre-built navigation blocks or hand-coded HTML.  But the customizability of the navbar layout affects what everyone in the Workspace sees (not just you), so this kind of flexibility can backfire, and you need to need to make sure that the folks on your team understand that they’re changing what everyone else sees, not just their own view. 

While the IM presence indicators in Central Desktop are nice, the chat rooms of Basecamp are better for capturing online chats so all can see them. Of course, Basecamp doesn’t have any presence indicators, so setting up a spur-of-the-moment meeting in a chat room still requires a separate IM client to contact teammates.  Marrying Central Desktop’s presence indicators with Basecamp’s online chat rooms would be the best of both worlds.

Central Desktop’s interface is functional, but I it’s not as slick looking as Basecamp, and certainly more cluttered due to the number of features and options it supports. Fortunately all the features don’t slow it down — Central Desktop is as fast as Basecamp in every respect. 

Despite the lack of support for day-long events, the Central Desktop Calendar is very usable, and combined with a similar Milestones system that Basecamp has, it simply can do more.

The bottom line, I think, is that Central Desktop is better suited to teams within the same company than teams made up of people from different companies.  I would feel more comfortable giving a contractor or client a Basecamp membership than a Central Desktop account, simply because Basecamp is easier to learn and simpler to use. The addition of Basecamp’s Time Tracking feature can also give that tool the edge for independent contractors who work with clients and want integrated billing help. Central Desktopmight overwhelm a casual or occasional user who isn’t used to team workspaces. 

However, if you can accommodate Central Desktop’s slightly steeper learning curve, you like the broader set of tools that it provides, and you’re looking for a collaborative team workspace that your team will live in each day, I recommend it. 

System Requirements

• Internet Explorer 5.5 and newer
• Netscape 7.1 and newer
• Mozilla 1.4 and newer
• Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and newer

For Central Desktop Live (the web conferencing tool):

• Internet Explorer 5.5 and newer is required to host web meetings
• No browser restrictions to join and attend web meetings.

Pricing

Like Basecamp, Central Desktop has a matrix of price plans.  At similar pricing levels, you get slightly less storage, fewer projects, and fewer team members.  For instance, Basecamp’s $24/month level, you getunlimited members/15 projects/200MB of storage.  In Central Desktop, at the $34/month level (which offers a discount to $25/month), you get 10 members/3 projects/ 250MB storage.

Note that Central Desktop gives a 10% discount for pre-paid annual account. It also offers a 50% discount to academic institutions and non-profits.

Here’s the matrix of pricing plans:

Up next: SiteScape’s WorkZon…

One of today’s most popular product segments for collaboration software is the team workspace — products like 37Signals’ Basecamp.  Some are expensive, others are cheap, or free.   Some you install on your own server, others are hosted on the developer’s site. Some throw in loads of features, others are lightweight and focus on just a few processes.  In this series of reviews, I will look at hosted applications, like Basecamp.  And I will begin with Basecamp, since it is the product by which many others are judged.  

One of today’s most popular product segments for collaboration software is the team workspace — products like Basecamp. You might not use the term "team workspace" for a product like Basecamp — Wikipedia calls Basecamp "project management software".  Regardless of the terminology, Basecamp and its ilk can be great, easily implemented solutions for getting a team going in the right direction.  

But recently I’ve been asking myself, what are those "ilk" – the other products that compete with Basecamp? Basecamp has garnered so much attention, and become so popular, it can be hard to find worthy competitors that people would consider.

Well, there are other products, and I felt it would be helpful to give an overview of them.  I initially envisioned this article as a listing of Basecamp competitors without much detail.  But as I got into it, I realized that I was commiting myself to a series – there’s no way to easily summarize the differences between products. Some are expensive, others are cheap, or free.   Some you install on your own server, others are hosted on the developer’s site. Some throw in loads of features, others are lightweight and focus on just a few processes.  For this series, I decided to look at just hosted applications, like Basecamp.  And I will begin with Basecamp, since it is the product by which many others are judged.  In total I intend to look at 10 products.

Basecamp

37signals, LLC.
400 North May Street #301
Chicago IL 60622
email@37signals.com

I’ll admit it: I have bias for Basecamp.  I have been a paying user of the product for a few months to organize the production of a club newsletter. Basecamp has been somewhat successful in helping streamline the newsletter production process of so far – much better than bouncing emails between a dozen people to coordinate ideas, documents, and feedback. Prior to Basecamp I had managed document revisions within Outlook, but it was getting to be too laborious to hunt around for the most recent version of a document in my inbox, and tough to tell which version of a document I was supposed to use. (Sometimes I would get the same document five or more times from the same person on the same day, with various grammatical changes.) Basecamp has been good in organizing that document management process. But I find the biggest challenge is getting others to use Basecamp. I suppose that is often the biggest challenge with collaborative software of any kind – getting everyone involved to commit to the new process. (We had a similar challenge at our office getting co-workers to use Groove.)

Michael Sampson reviewed Basecamp for us shortly after it came out last year, but since then, 37Signals has come out with many new features for the product.  So it’s time to revisit Basecamp.  In the reviews of Basecamp’s competitors that will follow over the coming weeks, I will use Basecamp a measuring stick.

How Does It Work?

Basecamp strength is that it does a few things, and does them very well.  People have flocked to Basecamp because it’s easy to use, and after about an hour of using it, you’ll have a solid grasp of what it can do. 

You won’t find Gantt chart support or the ability to import sophisticated databases.  37Signals has a very strong product design philosophy that revolves around simplicity and team agility, and it’s reflected in the Basecamp feature set and interface. That can be a big strength, because it makes Basecamp great for working with co-workers and/or external client users who aren’t tech savvy.  Almost anyone can figure out what’s going on pretty quickly. 

A Basecamp site can contain multiple projects (the number depends on the level of account you signed up for) and you can restrict someone’s access to certain projects, or give them blanket access to all existing and future projects. If the person is not in your company (e.g., a client), there are four sub-levels of permissions:

1.    No access.
2.    Access messages and files
3.    Access messages, files and to-dos
4.    Access messages, files, to-dos, and milestones

Basecamp isn’t designed for personal use – there isn’t any "personal space" that will shield files or data from other users. 

As I mentioned, Basecamp has developed the product from a particular philosophical standpoint, which is "simpler is better".  By and large, this works for them.  In some cases, you can see that this can agitate users.  Case in point: when creating a to-do list item, you can assign it to one person, or a whole organization, but not, say, two people working together who are equally responsible for getting that task done.  The developers at 37Signals defended this one-person-per-task restriction in their support forums, offered this explanation in their support forums:

If we listened and added everything everyone wanted, no one would want our product. Believe me.

We’d have comprehensive time tracking, comprehensive billing, comprehensive meeting scheduling, comprehensive calendaring, comprehensive dependency task systems, comprehensive instant message chatting, comprehensive wiki functionality, etc.

Yet, the #1 requests on all the customer surveys we do is: KEEP IT SIMPLE. THAT’S WHY WE LOVE BASECAMP, IT’S SIMPLE.

So you can see the developers at 37Signals have very strong ideas about their product, and do not necessarily cave in to the requests of their users. (To see a lecture by 37Signals’ CEO, Jason Fried, you can view this keynote video from the Collaborative Technologies Conference. His discusses his management and collaboration philosophy.)

Basecamp Features

•    Dashboard.  When you enter your workspace, your first stop is the Dashboard page, which gives you a snapshot of recently updated things for your projects. It also notifies you of impending or overdue milestones, and gives links to jump of to any of the projects. If you’re the system administrator for Basecamp (in other words, the lucky person that gets the bill for the service each month), you can also you see links to the current projects that you have access to, and recent changes to each one.  General messages to your team can be posted onto this page as well.

The Dashboard. The icons next to each item help you quickly categorize the type of item, and when it’s due. The two-week calendar at the top shows you upcoming milestones.  Note that there are only 3 dark-gray tabs on the top left, because I haven’t entered a specific project yet. Once you enter a project, you see more context-specific tabs (Chat, Writeboards, etc.) like that shown in the next screenshot.

•    Messages.  Users share a threaded discussion forum area that is specific to each project, where messages, replies and comments can be posted. The forum display is similar to a blog. Messages can be linked to project milestones via a drop-down list, so that when the milestone is viewed, its associated messages are also displayed. Messages are also supported by an email relay system, so that when you post a message, you can automatically email that message to others in Basecamp.  They can’t reply to that message with their own email, but they are at least prompted to visit the site and post replies there, which helps centralize all your communication. Forums support bold and italic text, with file attachments supported.

Messages in Basecamp.  You can see the general message to the other users of our workspace regarding this review.  That’s what the messages are for!

•    To-Do List.  These are for assign tasks to people, optionally notifying them via an automatically generated email when the task is created on the site.  Note that tasks can be assigned to one person, or anyone, or the entire company. The inability to assign a task to two or more specific people has caused some friction with some Basecamp users.

The To-Do list lets you assign tasks to a person. When a specific person is assigned a task, their name shows up before it. If it’s assigned to "anyone", no name is shown (like the bottom two items).

•    Milestones.  This is a calendar for scheduling project milestones. When you create a new milestone, you can optionally have Basecamp email the person, or whole team, responsible for that milestone telling them that it’s been added to the project.  The calendar shows next two weeks in box view, but has a text listing of all upcoming milestones below that.

Milestones are the scheduling/calendar feature within Basecamp. The yellow-highlighted dates in the right-hand 3-month view indicate events attached to them.

•    Writeboards.  This is a new feature since our last review of Basecamp. Writeboards are 37Signals’ collaborative writing product (a la Google’s Writely), which are integrated into Basecamp. Using Writeboards, you can collaboratively work on documents with other team members and track the changes to a document over time, revert to a prior version, and compare changes between versions. You can also add comments, which are displayed at the bottom of the document in discussion-board format. Writeboards support limited formatting features – bold, ital, lists, headers, indents, hyperlinks, and images – and this formatting is implemented using wiki-style formatting codes (not a Microsoft Word-style toolbar). The focus is getting content into Basecamp, not making it pretty.

•    Chat room. One chat room can be associated with each project for real-time communication with your team.  You can upload files in the chat room.  The chat rooms are based on 37Signals’ Campfire product.

•    File repository.  You can host files at Basecamp, or on your own site. If you are hosting your files with Basecamp, the maximum per-file size is 30 megabytes. If you are hosting files on your own FTP server, files must be 10 megabytes or less.  Of course when you use your own hosting server, there’s no upper limit to the amount of data you can store.

•    Time tracking.  This is only available on the Plus account ($49/month) and up.  It’s a way to track the amount of time you spend on various projects.

•    People.  This is a series of tables containing contact info for people at each of the companies who have access to your Basecamp site.  It’s table of contacts, listed in alphabetical order by first name, with their contact info and any headshot/avatars that users have uploaded to represent themselves.  

Next page: Reactions to Basecamp… 

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Back to Previous Page… 

Reactions to Basecamp:

•    It feels very responsive, like a desktop application. 
•    You can’t make a Basecamp site open to the general pubic — it is only available to members that you set up accounts for.  But you can give an unlimited number of people access at every level of service.  The inability to make a project open to the public wasn’t a problem for me, but I have seen other team workspaces that permit this.
•    It can optionally email users when there are changes to the workspace (new milestones, to-dos, etc).
•    It also offers RSS and iCal support. This means that, for example, when a new message is posted, to-do completed, file uploaded, and so on, your RSS feed is updated to alert you. RSS feeds are protected and require authentication on the server, so you can’t use them with, say, My Yahoo.
•    The granularity of Milestones in Basecamp is one day — no more, no less — so you can’t set a due date to be at a certain time on a given day.  So it’s not for coordinating team meetings for a specific time, or anything else that involves timing down to the hour level.
•    It supports SSL access at the highest 3 subscription levels.
•    It offers time tracking at highest 3 subscription levels.
•    The product has a very active and information-rich product support forum.  If you have any problems or questions, you’ll likely find answers quickly.
•    Search capabilities are limited.  You can search for text within messages, comments, file names, or links, but not within to-dos, events (milestones), writeboards, or people using Basecamp.  What’s more, search is limited within a single project, so if you have a number of projects and you’re trying to hunt down, say, a particular note that could apply to any number of those projects, you have to conduct a separate search within each project.
•    If you want to make use of the information in your Basecamp site in another application, or jump ship to another system, it is possible to extract your information, but not very easily.  Basecamp’s one-click exporting feature is limited to extracting messages and comments.  You can’t export to-do lists, milestones, or contacts without going into the system and individually downloading/copying the data.
•    It features an API for application integration.  Announced last Spring, the Basecamp API lets you build your own software apps to interact with your Basecamp project data.  It has also spurred a modest number of Basecamp add-ons.
•    It is in a constant state of rapid development, and they keep customers informed via a separate "Everything Basecamp" site.
•    Teachers (K-12, college, or special education) can ask for a free a Basic level Basecamp account. (A $12/month value.)
•   Given that Basecamp has chat capabilities now (one of the additions since our review last year), it would be great to enable the Basecamp with presence capabilities so that you could initiate chats more easily.

Price: There is a 30-day free trial on all accounts.  The various subscription plans vary in the number of active (which excludes archived) projects they manage, the amount of file storage allowed, whether SSL encryption is required, how many Writeboards you need, and whether Time Tracking is needed. (See the table below.)  For one project, there is no charge. For three projects, the price is $12/month. The highest plan supports an unlimited number of projects for $149/month.

Basecamp packages and pricing, as of September 2006.  (This is the most imitated pricing chart on the web right now, I think.)

That’s it for Basecamp.  If you’re a user of Basecamp, past or present, let me know what you think of  it using the comment box below.  And if you have any recommendations for other products in this series, let us know. 

Next up for review: Central Desktop. 

As we approach the five-year anniversary of 9/11, there’s going to be a lot of retrospective media coverage. Undoubtedly, some of that coverage will discuss the lessons we learned. One lesson, which relates to the topic of collaboration, was that emergency first responders didn’t have the ability to talk to each other.  Their radios didn’t interoperate — fire, police, paramedics, and others were communication islands. To compensate, some emergency personnel carried up to five different radios with them wherever they went, or they used runners to carry messages. Some simply didn’t communicate at all.  In the case of the World Trade Center attack, 121 firefighters never made it out of the towers in part because a warning from a circling helicopter warning of the impending collapse was only broadcast to the police radios. 

Even before 9/11 we knew about this communication problem, but for various reasons (which really boil down to budgets, bureaucracy, and technology), we still have a way to go. So this week I was encouraged when Rudy Mazza of Alcatel told me about a new system that his company helped create that will help in this respect.

I met Mazza at VoiceCon this week, where he sat down with my colleague, Eric Krapf, and me to talk about a new solution from Alcatel and JPS Communications (a Ratheon subsidiary).  The system uses equipment from both companies, and can patch radio systems together using a SIP interface. And thanks to SIP, it can also patch radios in with phone callers. Mazza explained how valuable the ability to patch phone calls to radio systems can be when, for example, government officials need to get details from first responders on the scene of a major incident.

Here are some scenarios to consider:

• After a hurricane, FEMA officials in Washington could call into a bridge line and talk directly to police and fire officials on the scene, who only have access to their radios. (Useful for converations like, "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job. Now get down here to New Orleans and help us out!")

• In a hostage situation, this technology could give police the ability to broadcast phone calls between the negotiator and hostage-takers over the radios of police in the area.

• In the event of a mysterious outbreak or bioterror attack somewhere in the country, it could allow a specialist from the Center for Disease Control talk to paramedics on the scene anywhere in the country.

As promising as this all sounds, we’re not there today. In fact, we’ve only begun to make progress. But it’s good to know that people are working on solutions to these problems, which can literally mean life or death.  If states pick up the ball and start to implement interagency communication networks (as New York, Washington, and others are doing), real progress will have been made.

If you’re interested in hearing the interesting conversation with Rudy Matta, you’re in luck because it was recording it for podcasting purposes. Listen to it here.

If you’re interested in the topic of bridging the communications systems of first responders, there’s a great paper (PDF) that explains the problem in detail. It’s a few years old, but still very relevant.

At CL we focus a great deal on the communication and collaboration needs of private enterprise, but it’s important to recognize that the public sector has the same, if not more, pressing needs. 

While I was taking some time off earlier this month, I missed a new app under development that was mentioned in various places, like Digg and TechCrunch.  It’s called activeCollab, and it is essentially a free knockoff of Basecamp that you can install on your own server.  As user of Basecamp (one of the best collaboration tools around, I feel), I’m glad to see someone building something similar that I can install on my own server.  Granted, activeCollab just is only in alpha, and it may never see the light of day. But I hope so, and apparently Jason Fried  (CEO, 37Signals) thinks so too!