Jamdo Marketing Blog

In my past post, I talked about selecting a partner for online website or blogging projects.

Now, I want to move onto a few aspects of how to organise an online collaboration when it comes to the stage of actually getting to work on your new project.

Quite recently I decided to team up with another blogger for a new project. We have been hashing out the details of the project for about 6 weeks so far and hopefully will get the thing off the ground in April.

While we work pretty well together and have developed sites together before, the limitations of developing a blogging business plan and ironing out all of the kinks via email are all too evident. It’s difficult to know what has been covered, without going back through a thousand emails and on some points you just seem to be going over covered ground. In fact it can get a little frustrating for all parties concerned.

That is why we have decided to try out an online Project Management application - BaseCamp. (Aff. link)

So far, I have been pleasantly surprised by how effective this site can be, though there are a few limitations at the free level.

It basically gives you an online way to plan and collaborate on a project.

You can develop milestones, write to-do lists, collaborate on virtual writeboards. It allows you to invite all of the team participants into the project area so they can add their two cents. You can set tasks for specific team members and write notes that everyone can see. When a team member is nominated as the person to complete a specific task, then you can also elect to have the system send them an email to let them know.

If you upgrade to a paid account you can share files, use time-tracking and have your project protected by encryption. So far I haven’t needed any of these features.

You can even track all of this via RSS, but be careful - if you want the project to remain confidential, tracking it via a public reader such as Bloglines will allow other people to read the feed (or at least part of it) of your project.

Anyway, if you are thinking of starting some type of online collaboration, then this application is one you might like to check out. It’s the right price (free!) and it can save quite a bit of confusion.

You can see it over at http://basecamphq.com

Technorati Tags: basecamp, blogging, project management

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