Basecamp Todos, Meet Your Due Dates

We've received a ton of feedback since we introduced Basecamp integration into our IntelliGantt products. For such a simple looking web application, Basecamp has an awful lot going on!

Which is a good thing and speaks well to how effective Basecamp's solution works as a communication tool.

Of course, scheduling is still a part of project management and that's where IntelliGantt comes in. We just posted a screencast that shows in detail how you can import a Basecamp project, apply schedules to the deliverables and, best of all, attach due dates back to the Basecamp Todo items. This means team members using their web browsers can see the most important piece of the project-- when their Todo item is due.

We did have to make a few assumptions. For example, when importing a Basecamp todo item, IntelliGantt creates a task. In order to create a task, we need at least a start date. Since Basecamp doesn't have one we use 'today'. Since rescheduling a project in IntelliGantt is as simple as dragging the project summary bar, it works.

Once in IntelliGantt, you can create task dependencies, regroup things in summary tasks and even define hourly rates for resources in order to see cost information.

To show start and finish dates we introduce a special 'Title Format' option that lets you prepend or append start or finish dates to Basecamp Todo Lists or Todo Items. That's a lot of 'ors', so this is a great segue to the screencast which shows you exactly how it works.

When you select a format like, 'prepend finish dates', your next update will adjust all Basecamp Todo items such that the due date will come before the Todo item's display name. This feature is locale aware so that US folks will see the dates formatted as Month/Day/Year while European folks will see Day/Month/Year.

There's a lot going on with this feature, but hopefully it will be simple and easy to use-- just like Basecamp.