BaseCamp

There's a lot to keep track of these days. Any business, organization, group, hobby or project needs a way to manage the various lists and correspondances which flow in and out of the day.

For years I've been managing my product development using a combination of Outlook, Excel, and Word. I dabbled in MS Project once but it took forever to learn and was way beyond my needs in terms of complication. I've continually found myself re-typing priorty lists and relying on email folder to organize myself.

No longer.

Enter BaseCamp - developed by the minds at 37Signals.com, BaseCamp is a simple web-based Project Management system which allows you to create a Project, To-Do Lists, Set Milestones, Upload Files, "Writeboards" (which are shared documents), invite other people to view and collaborative and quickly get a glimpse of the scope of the work that lays ahead of you (and beyond you once you've checked it off).

I've been test running it for the last week and am extremely impressed with the interface, simplicity and flexibility it provides. Of course there could be a few more layers, like comments for specific To-Do items and additional associations/fields here and there (apparently available in the more expensive package), but the simpleness of it lends itself very well to maximum use. It's all Web 2.0 Ajax i-fied, making adding items an instant breeze and even more fulfilling to check-off a to-do list item and watch it magically vanish before your very eyes without the page reloading.

I've started to think about how this can apply to any organization which has Projects they need to manage between multiple people. A band, for instance, could add a Project for their Tour. Each show could be a Milestone since it's on a specific date. Each show has a specific set of To-Do items like Contract, Advance, Publicity and Promotion which all have to get done by different people. Suddenly you've got different people using a centralized system to communicate with each other and watch the progress of your project, something everyone can get behind.

It's free for 1 project with limited access. Check it out and let me know if it works for you. I'm already thinking about ways we can integrate the JamBase tour date database with this using their open API. Geeky good.