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

Not being able to assign a single person to multiple teams is a fatal flaw within basecamp and one that I can’t for the life of me figure out why it hasn’t been fixed.

We are two copywriters who provide product to 6 different functional teams. We also act as the keepers of the projects, opening jobs and posting copy, documentation, etc. for various project teams.

When we open a job, we need to be able to assign it to a team more easily than hand-picking every member every time.

Here’s a little diagram that may help.

Copywriters

Joe
Jim

Others

Fred – project manager, Widgets
Barney – project manager, Doohickeys
Wilma – category manager over both Widgets and Doohickeys
Betty – packaging designer for Widegets and Doohickeys.

Teams

Widgets – Joe, Fred, Wilma and Betty
Doohickeys – Jim, Barney, Wilma and Betty

As it is, when we open a new job (2009 Holiday Widget) for the Widget team, we have to select each of the four people. Granting and denying Admin level access each time based on the role each will play.

The closest BaseCamp seem to come to delivering on this apparently revolutionary idea of Teams is through Company.

As I understand it, the database handles a person as a unique entity that can only be associated with a project. That person can also be (and is) assigned to multiple projects. However, that person can not exist within more than one Company.

So in order to kludge together a team, Wilma and Betty have to be entered in both the Widgets and Doohickeys “company,” requiring seperate, unique ids for each.

It’s a surprising and quite frankly inexplicable oversight on the part of BaseCamp that the ability to set up teams is missing.

Fixes suggested elsewhere on this board range from setting each person up in each company to setting up a single company and choosing members each time. The teams are fairly constant however, and taking the time to navigate through three screens to pick 6 out of 160 people is a lot of added work for the simple task of establishing a rallying point (sort of a main base, or camp or something) for a project. It makes what should be a two minute job turn into a five minute job. And as we open between 1 and 6 jobs per day, throughout the week, those 3 minutes add up.

Please figure out a way to add Teams. If you can’t, it will be the sole reason why our 160-person design/manufacture company was unable to accept this system and will eventually have to leave leave basecamp for something else.

Thanks,

Web Webster

Topic: How are you using Basecamp? / People not wanting to login.

What worked for us was

a) putting together a printed up tutorial with screen shots
b) establishing account names and passwords for each user that mirrored their system log-ins
c) refused to take any edits to copy etc., forcing prokect managers to log into basecamp to change copy, etc.
d) make sure when sending messages about writeboards being ready for use, that we cut and paste the “Share this” link versus the link with “123” in the URL … that tended to confuse the issue.

Topic: Troubleshooting and Bug Reports / Writeboard, email notification and password(s)

1) When informing BaseCamp members of a writeboard being posted for review, I understand that the “Email This WriteBoard” option is no longer available…

2) ...So to compensate, when I finish the first draft of a writeboard and save it, I need to go to the Messages area to send an email to the People named for the project.
3) Unless I type something into the body of the message, Messages sends all the recipients an email that’s empty save the links to the Messages portion of the BaseCamp project in question.

4) The people on my project are lazy and want to0 be able to link from within the message I just sent. So I…

5) paste the URL for the writeboard into the message. Maybe not elegant, but it should work. So if i copy and paste the URL shown in my browser window (e.g.https://123.writeboard.com/123a456b789c) there are times where the recipients of the email were asked to supply 123.writeoard.com with a writeboard password. This request comes whether the user is logged in or out, and regardless of the level of permissions that we’ve set for them. Everyone gets asked for a password but the writer of the writeboard never gave the writeboard the password.

6) However, if i simply copy and paste the link shown at the top of the WriteBoard frame (e.g. Share this WriteBoard at https://mycompanybase.projectpath.com/W123890) without having clicked on the link, the password request happens again when I click on it. SOOOOOOOooooo (big finish)

7) Is the “Share this link” link act as a “button” which the writebaord originator has to click to activate sharing with all of the people on the project

-OR—

8) Is the URL shown in that link (a companybase.projectpath.com URL) simply meant to be copied and pasted into a message

AND

9) why is a longtime-user who may actually be logged in to BaseCamp at the time of the message asked for a password to access a Writeboard URL

Sorry for the numbering to outline my question. It’s not meant to be the attacking numbering (“First, you did this! Second, you did that!) but the multiple-steps-to-get-to-my-question numbering.

If # 7 is the case, I might suggest that be recast as a button, or have some label beside it reading “Do You Want to Share the Writeboard with all the Members of this Project team? Click https://mycompanybase.projectpath.com/W123890 to Activate Sharing”

And I would request that the Email this Writeboard feature/button be reinstated On any given day, I might have 10 projects I touch and it seems more within the 37signals vibe to make it easy to communicate about something from the location of that something-to-be-communicated rather than leaving one place and going to another to communicate something about the place you just had to leave to communicate about it. (Man, that’s the last time I mix Bedadryl and a triple shot espresso :-)

Thanks,

Web Webster