You can now export Basecamp projects to PDF with a free trial of ExportReports.com version 1.0.
We’ve officially launched version 1.0 of the popular Basecamp add-on.
New features include:
- Project list sorted by company;
- Information about any attached files in Basecamp if a comment has attached files and;
- Customizeable page size to accomodate European Basecamp users, other non-US sizes and attornies using Basecamp;
- These are US Letter, US Legal, A4, A5, B4 and B5.
And in honor of the official launch we are offering your first PDF report for free.
Your first export of a Basecamp project is now free with ExportReports.com!
All of these features came from feedback from our Basecamp users. Please let us know what you’d like to see by adding a comment here.
Read a recent post on some of the limits people are reaching with Basecamp. They seem to apply to the general “software should do less” approach many people associate with Web 2.0.
The philosophy of software that “does less” can actually create more work and aggravation once users, teams or projects scale up to a certain level of complexity. The approach starts to lose its usefulness.
At a certain level of scope or scale, people can benefit from project management software (and software designers) that “do more” in terms of details and thought out interface and functional architecture/workflow.
This applies to functionality contained in the project management software (like scheduling and project planning) as well as functionality which reaches outside to users or clients (like automatic email notifications and identity management or access level management). It also speaks to the value of more involved customer support and training, where the project management software company takes time to understand the work their customer does.
Web 2.0 is about useful tools. “Do less” type software can certainly be useful and has its place (just look at the growth of Basecamp’s project collaboration tool). But these types of software are not one size fits all solutions. There are project management software solutions that offer similar benefits as Basecamp and other first generation Web 2.0 tools, but which are built to handle projects of a larger scale.
Recent talk on the scalability of Ruby on Rails (RoR) to build a web application more advanced than Basecamp (by 37signals, the creators of RoR) e.g. this from AKuAKu coming back from the Ruby on Rails unconference Rails Camp:
“The performance and scaling session which lasted about 5 minutes when no one could advance the high water mark for rails apps past basecamp.”
Reminds me of some earlier posts by Ben Forta, ColdFusion guru and related CF posts on the advantages of using ColdFusion (and ColdFusion on Wheels) to build larger scale apps.
To see a difference: in the project management software space compare Basecamp to Vertabase Pro (you can request a trial off the site). Vertabase Pro is written in CF.
