How To-Do list due dates saved the day for a Singapore company

Anol Bhattacharya, CEO of GetIT | Comms, a boutique outfit, based in Singapore providing interactive digital media solutions to hi-tech and telco companies, writes in:

Recently Basecamp's To-Do list added in a new feature of mentioning due dates, and coincidentally just at the right time for us.

Last Friday one of the project managers of our team had to rush to Seattle to attend to a Family emergency within 5 hours of notice. There are multiple very important projects ongoing and there was not enough time for a proper handover. Basecamp came to rescue! Quickly we jotted down all the To-Do's with due dates and comments. Since then, for the whole of this last week we have been using that To-Do page as a dashboard, with comments, counter-comments, adding & checking off 'to-do' items. So far we managed it well and most of the things are DONE! Thanks to Basecamp and my great team!

A screenshot of the page is attached, I had to strike out most of the texts due to confidentiality, sorry about that.

Inc. magazine looks at how an organic produce farm in Indiana uses Basecamp

"How to Choose the Right Collaboration Software" [Inc.] discusses the emerging breed of low-cost tools, including Basecamp, that are making project collaboration much easier.

"Companies have been looking for ways to make up for the overreliance on e-mail as a collaborative tool," says Jeffrey Mann, an analyst with Gartner. "Now we're seeing the evolution of tools that tackle everything e-mail is bad at -- like allowing users to follow a discussion, share files, monitor workflow, and get the latest status on tasks and projects."

The article discusses Stranger's Hill Organics (see above photo), an 81-acre farm in Bloomington, Indiana, that uses Basecamp to help its business of growing organic produce and selling it to Whole Foods Market, food co-ops, and farmers' markets.

Almost two years ago, the farm's founders, Dale and Lee Jones, brought on four new partners to help fund an expansion. That created some problems. The founders continued to work at the farm, but the new partners held jobs elsewhere and could make it out there only a few hours a week. That made it difficult for the owners to discuss topics such as tax planning, marketing budgets, and which crops were ready for harvest. "It was almost impossible to get everyone together on a regular basis," says Rick Dietz, one of the new partners.

Things changed last summer, when the owners began using Web-based collaboration software that allows them to create a central repository for information. The farmers now post updates using a laptop in the farmhouse. Each day, the farm's manager, Vanessa Caruso, logs in to see which tasks, such as fixing a barn's leaky roof, the partners have assigned. "We now have a way for everyone to communicate regardless of where we are," says Dietz...

Dietz, who is the IT director for the city of Bloomington, thought it would be less of a hassle to set up and maintain. "I didn't have the time to be the farm's system administrator as well," he says. He also wanted a tool that was inexpensive and easy to use. His choice: Basecamp, a Web-based collaboration program he had used before. For $24 a month, it offers to-do lists, a wiki, a chatroom, 3GB of file storage, and a function that lets users set milestones and track due dates. Dietz was able to set everything up in a few hours...

Now the partners use Basecamp to discuss strategic decisions and keep up to date on marketing efforts, crop conditions, and chores. Through Basecamp, the partners also check a daily log from Caruso, the farm's manager, who documents what happens in the fields. Among her recent posts: "Fixed a little wind damage on the field. Not too bad, though. Much warmer and windy. Mice seem to be eating squash seeds, so I moved all trays up to the cloche." Entries like that help all the partners sleep a little easier.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

Basecamp connects myows.com team members in Singapore and Cape Town

11 months ago, Max Guedy wrote to us detailing how Getting Real helped him create a new app. Recently, he wrote us again with details on how Basecamp helped him launch that app, myows.com. The tool is dedicated to providing a full suite of copyright solutions for designers, photographers, musicians, and anyone else who creates copyrightable work.

Just like 37signals, we're a small team (4 people), but we all have our own agencies or practice to run. To make matters even better, one of our team member lives in Singapore (the developer), whereas the 3 others are in Cape Town, South Africa.

Communication is of prime importance for a project the size of ours, and after a couple of emails went missing in action, I insisted that all communications be made through my agency's Basecamp account.

I put up a catchy name for the project ("the road to success") and my partners got to grip very easily with the Basecamp interface.

Documents are uploaded for approval, bugs are tracked through to-do lists and general messages go on a Writeboard.

Somehow it worked, and I'm proud to announce that myows.com went live yesterday with a minimal amount of bugs that we'll address during the BETA phase.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

New in Basecamp: An easier way to add 10 milestones at a time

Basecamp has always had an "add 10 milestones at a time" feature, but the date picker wasn't the easiest to use. We had three pulldowns - one for year, one for month, and one for day. It worked, but it wasn't optimal.

Today we launched a nice improvement we think you'll like. Now just click a "Pick a date" field and up pops a calendar. Click the day and it's set. That's all there is too it. Faster, easier, more contextual, and more fun to use.

Thanks again for using Basecamp.

The Basecamp outage / slowdown today

Today Basecamp suffered the worst outage / slowdown that it has had in a very long time. We're very sorry that this disrupted your day. We know that you depend on Basecamp and any downtime, no matter how rare, is a serious problem. That's why we want to share all the details with you, so we can be as transparent as possible and you can trust that we're doing everything we can to prevent this from happening again.

If you don't care about the technical details, the summary is that a server went down and our redundant backup server wasn't operational as fast as we expected it to be. No data was lost. We're making sure that both issues are taken care of and will not be repeated. If you do care about the technical details, read on.

It all started when we ran what should have been an innocent diagnostics tool to check the configuration of some hardware on the main database server. This tool wasn't so innocent after all and somehow managed to crash the server. (We're still investigating the root cause to find out exactly what happened).

This shouldn't have been a problem. We run a big, beefy slave database that's supposed to be ready at a moments notice. It has all the latest data, so even if the main machine is nuked out of orbit, we don't lose any customer data and can go straight back to trucking. Or so we thought.

The problem with this is that it's been way too long since we last had to failover to the slave server and in the meantime we've grown a ton. So while the slave database server has all the latest data and is just as beefy as the main machine, the read cache was cold because it's not being used to feed live requests. That means it has to build up the appropriate cache when we switched over to the backup server and that took way longer than we anticipated (last time there was much less data) and made everything painfully slow while it happened.

The solution is to make sure that the slave server sits with a pre-heated cache at all times, so it's ready to take over from the master immediately. There are a number of options available for this and we're looking at all of them to pick the best one.

Once again, we're really sorry for this. It was very painful to watch Basecamp be unavailable or slow for that long when we knew what we had to do to prevent this in the future. Please accept our apologies. Thanks for being a Basecamp customer.

New in Basecamp: Add due dates to to-dos!

This one's been a long time coming. It's been our top request for quite a while. Now you can add due dates to to-do lists in Basecamp.

We spent a lot of time working on the experience, the interface, and flow, and the speed of this feature. Countless variations and hundreds of little tweaks later, we think we nailed it. We hope you'll agree.

Here's a video showing you how it all works:

This is phase one of this new feature. We have some additional features rolling out for to-dos shortly. The next major feature will be showing dated to-dos on your Dashboard and Overview calendars. Currently those calendars only show milestones due in the next 14 days. Soon they'll show to-dos as well. We'll also be revamping and modernizing drag-and-drop reordering. We think you'll really like that as well.

So thanks again for your patience while we developed the due date feature for to-dos. We took the time to get it right. We think you'll agree it was worth it.

Thanks again for using Basecamp!

Inchoo on Basecamp: "It's simple for us and it's simple for clients"

How Inchoo uses Basecamp. (Warning: Shaky camera ahead!) Inchoo specializes in developing eCommerce solutions using Magento as a platform.

WiseClicker reviews "easy to use" Basecamp

WiseClicker, a resource for small businesses and entrepreneurs, offers up this review of Basecamp.

As a reflection of 37Signals’ philosophy for product development, Basecamp offers functionality that is easy to use, avoids bells and whistles and focuses on communication and collaboration. It is more for users that prefer getting things done practically and don’t really care about the formal charting and reporting side of project management.

Read the full review.

Reviews of over 25 Mac and iPhone apps designed to work with 37signals products

Check it out: MacAppStorm has posted a great piece on "The Ultimate Collection of 37signals Mac & iPhone Apps." It offers summaries and reviews of over 25 Mac and iPhone apps designed to work alongside Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire, and Highrise.

Nightline shows site run by Rainn Wilson of "The Office" using Basecamp

Rainn Wilson of "The Office" runs a philosophy/spirituality site called Soul Pancake. Nightline profiled Wilson and the site the other night. The bottom screengrab below shows the Soul Pancake team using Basecamp to manage the site.