Simplify - All On The Same Page

I don’t want this to turn into a 37signals try hard post, mostly because I used to drink their kool-aid wholeheartedly, but I’ve been straying from the flock recently. I’m on the verge of canceling my last subscription to a 37signals product because it’s just not simple and flexible enough for me. It’s missing some niceties that would make it way more useable.

First there was Basecamp and the world rejoiced because finally someone had clued in that managing projects is not about drawing Gantt charts and freaking out over critical path. It’s about providing simple tools for collaboration and letting the members of the team work together and communicate as they go along.

It’s great, except if you have clients who don’t like to post things to the web. 99.999% of people I’ve worked with before would rather send an e-mail and CC a bunch of people than post something online for everyone. I don’t know why that is, it isn’t a technical competency thing, it’s just… habit. So then what happens is that you end up spending vast quantities of time copying and pasting e-mail messages into Basecamp messages and trying to extract tasks and milestones from them.

And what’s the difference between a milestone and a task anyway? A milestone is really just a task with a date assigned to it. Strictly speaking, you could say that a milestone is comprised of a series of tasks; that’s not always the case though. Sometimes a milestone is just a date to remember.

Then there was Highrise (there’s a bunch of other things that 37signals did in there, but Basecamp and Highrise are their business-oriented products). Highrise is great because it integrates the e-mail angle in. You can forward messages on to Highrise, assign tasks based off of those messages — only it’s not really meant to work in the same way as Basecamp. It’s meant to work as an internal CRM tool for a company — so your clients aren’t logging in and working collaboratively with you in the way they can with Basecamp. Solves one problem, creates another.

So something I’m working on now in my spare time is All On The Same Page. I can’t say there’s anything especially ground breaking to this product; it’s more or less a fusion between Basecamp and Highrise with a bunch of junk torn out. I’m through with using tools that create more work for me, so I’m building my own to help me handle the client work I do. If I get it to a nice point, I’ll release it for others to use as well (that’s a little ways off). I’ve got the groundwork done, now I’ve got to throw in some spit and polish.