
To improve communications, the team used Internet Relay Chat (IRC), however, IRC didn’t fully meet their needs. At the time, the team developing Glitch was working out of three cities: New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver. In 2009, the company Tiny Speck was working on Glitch, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Like Basecamp, Slack was initially created for internal use. While hill charts can be useful, they’re subjective, since they’re based on how a user feels about the progress of their project, rather than objective data. Within these various sections, users can make group announcements (Message Board), assign tasks (To-Do’s), view deadlines (Schedule), or create user-defined questions that can be asked to the team at specified intervals (Automatic Check-Ins).įor instance, you might set up a question, “Are you blocked on anything?” that members are prompted to answer each morning at 9AM.Īdditionally, Basecamp offers hill charts that let users visualize to-do lists as hills - with the top of the hill representing a project’s midpoint.

For instance, you might have a hub for your marketing team or a hub for a product launch.Įach hub has six sections: Message Board, To-Do’s, Docs & Files, Campfire (real-time chat), Schedule, and Automatic Check-Ins. Within Basecamp, users can create hubs - which are essentially repositories of information used for either teams or projects. Although Basecamp 3 is sometimes referred to as a project management tool - and it can be used for that - it lacks some common features of PM tools, like time-tracking, Gantt charts, and board views. Today, the latest version of the product is known as Basecamp 3, and this version is the subject of our review.īasecamp 3 is a web-based tool used by teams for work management and collaboration. Over the years, 37signals - which changed its name to Basecamp in 2014 - continued to develop its original product, known as Basecamp Classic. The tool helped the firm run its projects so well that eventually, clients began asking how they could get their hands on it … which inspired the 37signals team to put Basecamp on the market in 2004.

Basecamp was originally created as a PM tool for use at web design firm, 37signals.
