Topic: Miscellaneous / Accepting a quote/contract in Basecamp (UK Law)

My wife is studying for her professional exams as a Chartered Landscape Architect, which has led to some interesting discussions on contract law (no really!) in our house. In the UK, the Electronic Communications Act 2000 gives electronic documents the same legal legitimacy as paper documents. Project extranet systems are specifically mentioned as having to comply with ISO/IEC 17799 to be admissable in court. I suspect that Basecamp is not ISO/IEC 17799 compliant, which means I will not be able to, for example, write up a quote as a message and have a customer accept it in a comment. I suspect, although I haven’t read the ISO (paying CHF 202,00 put me off) that the issue would be in the fact that messages can be freely edited by the author and that the changes are not versioned, therefore the message the commenter has agreed to could be changed at a later date.

For the moment I will be asking clients to agree to contracts and quotes outside of Basecamp, which is a slight shame as it would be great to keep everything in one place. An alternative might be to place the contracts in Writeboards, which are versioned, or (less elegantly) in other comments, which aren’t editable after the fifteen minute period of grace.

Can someone from 37Signals confirm that my suspicions about ISO/IEC 17799 are correct for any of the Basecamp contract/quote acceptance ideas I suggest above? Anyone got any better ideas?