For those using Basecamp in a corporate setting, what did you come up against in terms of your company’s resistance to using a webapp? Issues I would anticipate being of concern would be keeping all of the (perhaps sensitive) data stored outside company control; also, the need for corporate auditing of communications, particularly in the financial industry.

Thanks

I guess that these issues could be a problem. We work with an insurance company and ‘host’ creative files like brochures etc. These files have been classified as very sensitive and they have set up several rules regarding the access and storage of these files.
Since files are stored on Amazon S3, maybe they have some more info on security issues.

Either there are not many companies with sensitive data using BC or everyone’s afraid to address your question. I agree with you that it’s a problem. Every large company worth a grain of salt has spent years building a fortress for its data storage using firewalls, encryption, secure login etc. With Basecamp sensitive data could end up being saved outside of this walled fortress which raises questions for security.

Another problem is user management: when someone leaves the company all their accesses are revoked. With Basecamp there’s no way for IT to centrally control user administration since anyone can setup an account on Basecamp. If an employee leaves and the administrator forgets to delete them from BC the ex-employee could have assess to all sorts of sensitive information. It’s for these reasons that most larger enterprises will end up using an internally hosted app like Microsoft Sharepoint (which is inferior to BC in many ways).

I would be great to hear if anyone has found solutions for these kinds of challenges.

My experience is that if you make a BIG announcement in a corporate company that you gonne use BC, then the ITguys, Lawyers and procedure managers wake up.

Result : No Basecamp.

Therefore just don’t make a big fuss about it.
And announce it as a little help tool….

Result: Nobody cares…..

And once a team has been using it for a while and big lawyers find it out, they will have to fight to take that “little” tool away from them, since it has shown an increase in productivity and quality.

:-)

My experience is similar to JPBs. Keep it quiet. Most people using BC don’t even realize it’s not on our company servers.

I’ve asked the BC guys for more info on their security. They ignored my question. We make sure to not store any “sensitive” company data but I’d still like a better understanding of how safe our data is from intrusion.