Topic: Feature Requests / Bulk import users

+1 for both bulk import and for bulk export

Topic: Feature Requests / Highrise and Basecamp integration

When I reflect on Basecamp, I always think about all the civic, volunteer, NGO type organizations I work with, and that what they all need is blended online project management with CRM. My intuition is that if you did this (Highrise integrated with BaseCamp), but managed to keep the monthly charges modest, you could have a monster of a hit in that market segment. I would certainly try it out.

Topic: Feature Requests / Recurring Milestones!!!!!!

I manually enter recurring milestones using the “Enter 10 milestones at a time” page. However, the functionality that would really be useful is if when I created a single milestone, I could say “This one recurrs” and then basecamp would say to me “How many days, weeks, months to the next occurance” and ask me “recur forever or stop at a certain future date”, and then it would appear as a single milestone—until I check it off, as done. Then it would leave a shadow of itself as completed with the date I check it off, but move itself to the next recurrance date.

I know that there are some subtleties about the right way to do this. If a milestone is completed “later than schedule”, does the increment of time to the next scheduling occur from the data completed or from the target date? So one choice is for Basecamp, after I mark a recurring milestone completed, is to ask me when to schedule the next one for.

Thank you,
Bob

Topic: Feature Requests / Merging To-dos and Messages, to-do status and other tales

We are heavy users of associating messages with milestones, but if BaseCamp gave a choice to associate a message with a ToDo item, and navigate back and forth, that would also be useful. This is because we in effect treat milestone as ToDos with hard target dates, and ToDos as Milestones with open-ended target dates.

Topic: Feature Requests / Sweet Mother of Pearl, puuuhleeeeease give us teams!!!

+1 for teams

Topic: Feature Requests / Multiple People assigned for the: To-Do List and Milestones

I need this feature. I currently create pseudo-Basecamp users that say things like “Emily AND Bob”, but of course when “Emily” is logged in, Basecamp doesn’t know those items are associated with her, and same for “Bob”. I have amazing respect for the 37Signals team, but I also find it troubling when feature requests are denied based on the way the 37Signals team likes to see collaboration occur. I realize there may be technical complexities in supporting this feature (e.g. what if both Emily and Bob are logged in at the same time, and just as Bob wants to update the description of a joint todo item, Emily is also updating the description, etc.), but it would still be worth taking on. In one of my projects, I am now planning to tag-team with an individual 12 hours time-difference from me, in Asia, and which ever one of us completes a ToDo will check it off, etc. I don’t want us to share one user name, because I want traceability as to different messages and writeboard changes.

There a lot of emerging free online collaboration spaces (Google, a bunch of online Wiki services, iGroops, etc. etc.) and I hope 37Signals will continue to walk the fine line of producing a reliable, learnable BaseCamp while supporting the needs of a broader set of customers.

Thanks,
Bob

Topic: Feature Requests / emailing messages to basecamp

+1

Topic: Feature Requests / Milestone Feature Request

I would like the Milestone Entry Template to permit (not require) a second target date, later than the main target date. I would like the display showing what’s coming up for the next 14 workdays to show a band when a particular milestone has a target date. I am willing to live with a limit, such as that the later second target date is no more than 30 days after the first one.

Besides the general reasons for doing this, about 1/10th of my milestones are in fact multi-day events, like a conference, and currently I have to use the the “Enter 10 milestones at a time” page and re-enter – Conference day 1 of 4 on the first line, Conference day 2 of 4 on the second line, etc.

So if you can’t permit multi-day milestones (my real request), could you at least make that “Enter 10 milestones form” do more of the work for me. So perhaps allow the 2nd and following lines to say “following day” (via a checkbox) and then not require me to enter the text on all those following days? Or give another drop down to the right of the entry, which says “make n duplicates on consecutive days” where I can select “n” from a drop-down list or type it in?

Thank you,
Bob

Topic: Feature Requests / Notes for milestones

I would use a Notes field for Milestones if entered.

I also wish that when entering a milestone, the checkbox that said “Notify person now and 48-hours in advance of deadline”, had a little more flexibility. What I really want are 2 checkboxes: Notify now – yes or no (I’d often choose no, because I had just talked with this person, why clutter their inbox) Notify before deadline – default is 48-hours in advance (yes or no, and the ability to change 48-hours to any number of hours up to 48 or any number of days up to 100).

Topic: Feature Requests / Email address for a project?

+1 if 37Signals just specifies the exact e-mail address, the exact e-mail subject line, and the format needed for the incoming e-mail content, to allow content addition or content deletion from a given project.

+1 +1 +1 if 37Signals goes beyond that and makes it so the email notices that go out to people, such as “you are being notified about a new todo or milestone involving you, just entered” or “this is the 48-hours before the milestone is due reminder” have easy links inside them so people can just click the link in their e-mail client, or push “reply” in their e-mail client with a simple word like “milestone is complete” or “milestone is delayed until mm-dd” or whatever.

Topic: Feature Requests / Drag 'n Drop Month-view Calendar

I would use this if it was provided.

Topic: Feature Requests / Implement "tags"

I would appreciate the ability to assign tags to milestones, todos, files, writeboards, and then when I go to a view such as “show me all milestones”, to be able to not just display chronologically, but to display all the tags alphabetically with the relevant milestones indented under the tags they belong to. I would also like a way to select one existing tag when I am on the project overview page (maybe also on the dashboard, I have to think more about that), and see all the recent messages, files, milestones, todos in that project associated with that tag.

I don’t think this is really the same as the categories which we have today for messages. I think the essential difference is there could be more than one tag covering a given piece of information, and it would cover not just messages, but todos, milestones, etc.

Topic: Feature Requests / Hide / UnHide "PEOPLE" in a given project

I run long-running (many months, sometimes years) projects. I would like the ability as someone moves off a project which is still continuing, the mark them as a project alumni. I want them to show up at the bottom of the “People” view, so people who may have read material they posted in a message or in a Writeboard can know how to reach them if they really have to, but I want it clear since they wouldn’t appear among the central project participants that they are no longer actively contributing to this project.

And of course, if we later shuffled staffing, people could return from “Alumni” status back to active status.

Topic: Feature Requests / Milestone movement tracking

This would be useful to me also.

Just a short line at the end of those milestones that were pushed forward saying “Target date was originally: .... but was revised because …” with a few words which Basecamp would capture when the date was pushed forward.

I do want to know whether this particular specific milestone was pushed back, or whether an earlier milestone it depended on was pushed back leading this one to get pushed back proportionally.

Also when looking at those milestones that have been completed, would be nice to have a summary line at the top: “12 milestones completed, 9 on their originally commited date, largest slip was 17 days, 4 milestones remain” or something like that.

Topic: Feature Requests / Turn Milestones into a calendar!

I know the 37signals prides itself on not duplicating existing functionality built into other (especially widely available open source) offerings. However, I want to suggest one most improvement to Milestones “in the direction of being a calendar”, and one more substantive request, and then one change to the Dashboard.

The smaller request is to make the short names of the months shown on the right of the Milestones view “Mar” “Apr” “May” into links, and if I click that link, I’d like to see a grid like month calendar view page for that month, with the appropriate milestones showing in the appropriate cells for their specific dates. I say this because I really find it easier to comprehend the grid view for the next 14 days which already appears at the top than I do a linear list of text, but many of my projects have a cluster of planned milestones near to completion, and being able to see a grid of “that final month before the big delivery” would be very very welcome.

The substantive request (which for all I know, might require changes to the Internet Calendar Standard or whatever), is to have two-dimensional linkage between the calendar I use, and the milestones in the projects I am working on or following. I know that using the Feeds facility in Basecamp my calendar can be populated with milestones. But if one of the milestones is one I am responsible for, and I go to my calendar and change the date I’ll have it done in my calendar, I want my calendar to prompt me (or maybe just do it) to “pass this change back to your Basecamp project”, and then through some service interface update the date (or it could be the text, or it could be both) of the milestone.

The related change to the Basecamp Dashboard would be to have a little image of something right below the “Due in the next 14 days” grid (or maybe right after the characters of the title that says “14”), and if I clicked on that, the Dashboard’s grid would grow incrementally. For example, click this once and it would change to “Due in the next 28 days” grid. Click it again and it would add another 2 weeks. Click it again and it would add another 2 weeks. Maybe if Basecamp was really smart, this clickable image would disable if there was nothing beyond what was now showing in the expanded “Due in the next…” from any of my projects.

Thank you to the 37signals development team for listening.

Topic: Feature Requests / Polls

We would also use this feature.

Topic: Feature Requests / Exposing Messages in a Category as an external blog

I have a case where the messages that we are posting into a certain category are in fact status updates that a much larger community (but not users of my basecamp project) would like to be able to see. We are discussing manually copying them into a separate blog, whose web address the larger community would know. I wonder if you have considered building this into BaseCamp. For example, if I made the message category “Progress Notifications” marked as “ALSO PUBLISH AS BLOG”, then anyone on the web could use a URI like http://myname.grouphub.com/blogs/project-name/Progress%20Notifications and see something that looks like a regular blog, populated with whatever messages we had created. Perhaps the part of the external URI which I put as project-name and as message-category-name could be specified by the administrator, rather than defaulted to whatever these things are called in my basecamp site.

I’m not sure what would happen if an external person replied to something on the blog. Would we want you to copy that back into the messages in Basecamp, with some guest id, or would we not want to allow any replies or posts. But it would save us some copying of text, and the inevitable times that in a rush we would forget to copy.

Thanks, Bob

Topic: Feature Requests / Group Calendar

This would also be helpful for us.

Bob

Topic: Feature Requests / Administrator Setting & Text

There are numerous places where the word “company” is both used for my organization (using BaseCamp) and for each client organization that we conduct projects for or with. Since I am using this not for a for-profit organization, but rather for several kinds of associations, religious institutions, and NGOs, it would be wonderful if in a future version of BaseCamp, I, as the account owner of administrator, could supply a phrase in place of “company” (meaning us) and “company” (meaning the organizations that we do projects with and for), and Basecamp would then use those words or phrases in its extremely helpful text.

Topic: Feature Requests / Copying projects

I sometimes want to start a new project (with a new name) which would import from one of my former projects the same set of people, and the same message categories, and the same project overview text, from an previously archived project. For example, open up “Annual Meeting 2008” project by copying content from project “Annual Meeting 2007”. It would be ideal if it gave me a checklist of each File and each Writeboard in the old project, and I could select which ones should be copied over and which I do not need in the new project.

Topic: Feature Requests / Archive to .zip

I would use the “Archive to downloadable .ZIP file” at the conclusion of most projects—saving me from saving each item in the Writeboards, each File, and from saving the “People” in this project and the “Milestones” in this project manually.

Much less frequently would I want to reactivate a project from a ZIP. But I might want to start a new project (with a new name) which would import the same set of people, and the same message categories, and the same project overview text, from an previously archived project. For example, open up “Annual Meeting 2008” project by starting with ZIPed “Annual Meeting 2007”. But this is far less important than just the archiving.

Topic: Feature Requests / Filter by Responsible Party (To Do)

It would be helpful if the affordance on the right side of the ToDo screen had “Show ToDos assigned to:” and a first drop-down list of people in this project, (as it does now), followed by “or assigned to:” and a second drop-down list, also of people in this project. The default for the first would remain “Anyone”; the default for the second would be “-no specification-”.

I would frequently be going to this view and selecting myself for the first entry, and the pseudo-user which is the name of my team for the second entry.

Topic: Feature Requests / Approved Checkbox

Since it is not uncommon for something I send out for approval to be returned with “additional revision suggestions”, I would support Matt’s idea as long as there was a way for the client user to check “thumbs down”, and type in a message concerning their decision.

Topic: Feature Requests / Adding notes to milestones

I would also like to see this function provided.

Topic: Feature Requests / Calendar

I also believe improved calendaring directly in BaseCamp would make a lot of what we do easier.