Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

Santos, the thing to remember about activeCollab is that it’s starting from the position of being a free clone of / alternative to Basecamp, the simplistic project management tool from the folks behind Rails.

Customers love Basecamp. It has a very clean user interface that doesn’t scare off folks who aren’t all that comfortable using computers. This is really its strong point; it allows you to engage those customers you’d normally spend hours on the phone with instead.

But, for project managers, the downsides quickly add up. In the office, many of our developers describe Basecamp as a just another bulletin board. The lack of structured data makes Basecamp easy to start using, but when you need to run off a progress report, maintain central action plans, or manage risks and issues, the lack of structured data starts to bite. Oh, and you currently can’t get all your data out of Basecamp either, which puts a bit of a dent into your business continuity planning. (To be fair, you can get a lot of it out, but the process isn’t a one-click solution atm).

In this context, ActiveCollab’s current behaviour makes perfect sense. You don’t want everyone and anyone being able to sign up by themselves, and suddenly be able to see what your project plans are. I’m sure your defense and public-sector customers would just love that! (Or any of your customers, come to think of it )

But I hope the ActiveCollab folks read your blog entry. One of my personal pet peeves about Basecamp is that it’s a stand-alone island. It’s not integrated with anything (including other products from 37 Signals); and there’s nothing causes confusion on projects like duplcation. It’d be great to see ActiveCollab provide a plugin architecture, so that folks can add stuff like wikis, bug trackers and more. Being able to mix & match features, so that it be tailored to what each organisation wants, would be a killer feature imho.

Oh, and if you want to be able to “just” install trac and use it, without having to mess about with dependencies or anything else, you should be using Gentoo