I’m a big fan of the KISS philosophy. Specially on software and most of day2day things. I’ve been into all the 37Signals ‘Less is More’ Hype for a while and from all the web services they have, I just keep using Campfire and Basecamp. Campfire is the fastest way to have a chat and share some files with my co-workers, as we work in several separate places most of the time. The ability to search and share all the messages and enable guests on every channel is a must. Sometimes you want to have a chat with someone and you don’t want to use your IM account for that. Basecamp is very UI attractive and what I liked most is that I didn’t have to loose several days just to be able to actually use it. Intuitive. I was up & running in minutes. I realize that the most important thing is not todo lists but the message boards. You can keep a track of the discussions of what you’re doing together with your team and you can follow that by RSS or e-mail. No more reply-to-all, attaching files and CC mails for communicating. We were using e-mail as the only tool for collaboration and that sux. Really. Meanwhile, if you are not the kind of guy to buy the SaaS concept you have a .php, opensauce clone of Basecamp, it’s called ProjectPier and you can download and install it on your own LAMP server. It started as a fork of activeCollab, and it’s very simple to use it. It has all the main features: Tasks, Milestones, Files and Messages. I miss just one thing, Time Tracking. It has a very clean UI, simple to use. It’s perfect for small team projects. If you’re running the latest 0.8.0.2 version keep in mind that it has a serious bug on the mail notifications. The problem was identified and the code is now fixed.
