ContentMay 24th, 2006 by DeWitt Clinton
Does anyone know of software that one can download and install that’s rather like Basecamp?
Basecamp is great — if you can host your data outside your network. But when you can’t, and you still want to be light and agile, what do you do?
Ideas?
May 24th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
*Cough* Tasks Pro *Cough*
I take a much more granular approach than BaseCamp does, and I’ve got a number of happy customers that are BaseCamp refugees. Let me know if you have questions you have about the software and the approach I’ve taken with it.
If there is one thing I’ve learned about task management systems, it is that you need a system that works the way you think. No system will be sympatico with everyone.
May 25th, 2006 at 4:32 am
Alex, thanks for the pointer! I couldn’t agree more with your sentiment that nothing is right for everyone. In our case, I’m not even sure we know what will be right.
I will definitely give Tasks Pro a try…
May 25th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
I wasn’t that impressed with Basecamp. Nice UI polish, but it’s like going back to the first Palm Pilot: it’s simple and clean simply because it doesn’t do much.
There’s a huge pile of free/open source packages out there like phpProjekt and phpCollab, but the ones I’ve looked at are all VERY rough around the edges and not in the same league as Basecamp. Can’t recommend any of the ones I tried.
In the long run, the next release of MS Office/SharePoint will do all this kind of stuff, and you could host it internally, but I’d guess that’s not the direction you want to go. (And hosted Office Live demo accounts are free, but require all users to have IE6. Bah.)
TasksPro only addresses a piece of the puzzle, but it’s solid and impressive for what it does. Its model of the world does have its quirks. The main obstacle I found was that my end users found it confusing and intimidating. (*sigh*) On the plus side, Alex is VERY responsive in answering questions. [I have no relationship with him other than as having tried TasksPro.]