What features might our team find lacking if we adopted Basecamp for bug tracking, task tracking, external documentation, collaboration, and project management?
I've used the free version before and think that 37Signals makes excellent products - but I wanted to hear from you what the drawbacks might be.
I've been using BaseCamp for 2 years now and found it to be an excellent general project information portal. The ability to store documents, to-do tasks, and milestones with a living project view is pretty impressive.
Unfortunately their mantra of 'keep it simple' also has quite a few drawbacks in regards to capabilities:
- the calendar is practically unusable for anything but the most basic of milestone tasks... to keep track of our dev team we actually pulled together a custom Google Calendar implementation and use it for all developers and their tasks
- BaseCamp is pretty difficult to use for bug tracking once you get a fair number in there assigned to various people - the ability to sort is lacking (beyond just turning people on and off) - you'll be much happier with a full Bug Tracking solution such as FogBugz.
- For general project management Base Camp is fine but we've also found that we have external documents where we keep all the 'real' information - basically the multi-page specs and just upload them to Base Camp every once in a while.