Basecamp

I've made a start on setting up a project in Basecamp.

The last few projects I've been involved with have used Excel to list tasks with columns to sort by date due, and person responsible. While this has worked reasonably well, I would have liked to have produced gantt charts (without manually colouring in cells representing weeks etc) that change as the dates are changed.

I have Microsoft Project, though because we only have one licence it is not really practical to use in team where more than one of us needs to get involved. With our current project having people located all over the place, we thought it would be a good idea to try an online project planning tool.

Basecamp hasn't solved the Gantt chart problem. The only "date" items are the milestones, which are in a separate section to the "to do" list, which can be grouped, though not categorised or be assigned a due date. But maybe being more judicious in assigning due dates will make the ones which have been set, more of a focus, and so more likely to be achieved??? Not convinced about this one yet.

Basecamp does offer other features useful for us though. Apart from the whole team being able to access the system no matter which library/city/country they are in, it also provides on online area where team members can contribute to communal "writeboards", join chat sessions, and subscibe to an RSS feed for team members to kept informed on progress without actually having to log in.

Overall - I'm not convinced. There are other online tools to support collaboration, and so far this one doesn't excite me in terms of scheduling (what i'm looking for most in a project tool). We'll see how it goes. I'll set up Open Workbench for another project we've just started - not online, but probably better at scheduling.