When working on Our Stock Works with my business partner, we had an awful lot of work to do, in many different areas. A lot of emails were thrown back and forth, and we talk a great deal via Adium (we both use Mac’s). This system works very well for a while, but there comes a point where you have a full inbox, and a list of tasks which need prioritising, assigning to one person or the other, and ticking off when they are done.

Enter 37 Signal’s Basecamp.

Basecamp is a unique project collaboration tool. Projects don’t fail from a lack of charts, graphs, or reports, they fail from a lack of communication and collaboration. Basecamp makes it simple to communicate and collaborate on projects.

It certainly does! We’ve been using Basecamp for a long while now, and it’s helped us enormously. I’m going to summarise some of the features, and explain why they’re great:

To Do’s
Pre-Basecamp we simply shuttled emails back and forth to organise things which needed completing. Basecamp offers To Do lists, which can be assigned to any member of the team and be ticked off when complete. Whenever a new to do is added, or one is completed, I am notified through an updated RSS feed in my feedreader. It keeps me up to date with what my business partner is doing (and vice versa).

Writeboards
Some emails are really important. They need to be worded just right, and come across perfectly. This means they need to be collaberated on when writing them. Writeboards are an amazing way to do this, offering collaberative changes and brilliant version tracking highlighting what’s altered since the last edit.

Milestones
If only iCal offered an easy way to share a calendar with a specific person. Hopefully that’s coming in Leopard, but for now, Basecamp offers a solution. You can set targets and milestones of specific dates, and subscribe to this through an iCal feed. This keeps us both up to date and makes sure we hit our targets and deadlines.

One thing we haven’t yet utilised is Campfire. This is another 37 Signal’s product, offering online chat facilities between a group of people. It integrates and plays nicely with Basecamp. At present, we’re happy with our MSN messenger solution (via Adium), but this may be more useful in the future with it’s logging and file preview services.

Another great thing about Basecamp is it’s Web 2.0 AJAX functionality, built over Ruby on Rails. It really feels like a professional application with incredible user design, and an intuitive layout. Text isn’t overused, they say what they need to in order to make the system user friendly and straight forward.

If you’re looking for a system to help you organise a project, share files, documents and to do lists. If you want all this to be updated via email and RSS, managed from a central location and really intuitive to use - Basecamp will be perfect for you. Check it out.