Innova has tried a few things in the past to keep our projects organized. We have an internal Wiki that we use for sharing data, fileservers every five feet for document sharing, an inter-office Jabber server that keeps our IMs going. We use FogBugz to track bugs, Harvest to track time, and emails and sporadic meetings to tie everything together.

On larger projects that span more than three people, this tends to break down a bit. The individual tools are awesome, but emails and occasional face-to-faces just weren’t getting the job done. We just couldn’t keep everything organized amongst everyone with such an ad-hoc system.

Enter Basecamp.

Full disclosure: I’m a big Getting Real advocate, and I love the Rails framework. So when we needed a tool to help us manage our projects, I immediately thought of Basecamp.

First-day impressions: bad-ass. To-do items couldn’t be easier, dropping relevant emails/IMs in as messages is a snap. For the projects where we do two-week sprints, setting those up as milestones and working off of those is great. And I haven’t used it yet, but I’m imagining that the iCalendar feed is going to be a big win. The dashboard looks extremely useful.

I wish the access controls were a little more fine-grained than just “Administrator” and “Not Administrator”. Also, since I’m the Basecamp Account Owner I’m on everything whether I want to be or not, which might mean I’ll have to create a personal account and redirect the owner account to a shared e-mail.

It won’t replace any of our dedicated tools, but as a central point where we can organize everything it seems like it’s a big win!