Hi all! This is a newbie post—we’re hoping someone out there will have a good idea for us…

Our team has been using Basecamp for a little while now, and we LOVE it. The one thing we’re struggling with is that there’s no file check-in/check-out feature. We have some documents that our whole team (5 people) works on, and with no check-out feature, we’ve had a couple problems where two people downloaded the same file at the same time, made changes, then re-uploaded. Of course, whoever uploads second wins, because their version is listed as the most recent version, and the other person’s changes get lost in the shuffle.

We haven’t been able to figure out a workaround for this, short of telling everyone on the team that any time they want to work on a file, they first need to send a message to the rest of the group saying “hey, is anyone else working on file X right now?”. Which is… not great.

I’ve been looking back through Basecamp’s features, hoping for some feature I didn’t know about that would help: maybe an icon or timestamp that indicates when someone last downloaded a file—at least that would provide a clue that someone else might be working on it. But so far, I haven’t been able to find anything that’ll solve this problem.

Are there any experienced users out there who’ve run into this same problem and figured out a good solution? We’re at a loss!

There isn’t a Basecamp feature that handles checking-in and checking-out, so you’re going to need a workaround.

We haven’t been able to figure out a workaround for this, short of telling everyone on the team that any time they want to work on a file, they first need to send a message to the rest of the group saying “hey, is anyone else working on file X right now?”. Which is… not great.

First, we’d use probably use Campfire for this kind of back-channel communication, rather than Project messages. We don’t need “OK, I’ve just downloaded File X to make some changes” and “OK, I’ve uploaded it again” in the public record, especially if clients have access to the project. (Then again, I can see that some people might like that.)

This is one of those “Gee I wish I had one of those… [insert feature here]” situations that make me wonder. Sometimes the additional communication these constraints impose are actually useful. They get your team members talking to each other more. Personally, I’d just like to see “Mike downloaded File X” in the RSS stream or, better, one of those entries in our Campfire chat.

Also a newbie here. We run into the problem only occasionally. If we’re doing a lot of collaborative editing, we just use a writeboard. But sometimes there are formated documents that we know a few people are going to be handling. In that case we just agree that when someone takes it down to work on it – they upload a replacement file that is simply titled “Jim has it out.” The older version is still there for reading purposes, but now “Jane” has to wait for Jim to finish if she wants to edit—or at least she knows where to go if he forgets to put the new one back up. It’s not an elegant work around, and maybe some old hands have a better one . . .

Get a document management solution. Basecamp is not meant to track documents in the way you are describing (at least not right now, who knows what they have planned).