New Look For Basecamp – Basecamp Viewer Shows Milestones in Red, Yellow and Green!

Basecamp Viewer is a simple and free add-on for all Basecamp users. It shows all active projects with milestones in a simple 6 month wallchart calendar view. A subscription version offering more views and update capability is still in the works.
By: pCapacity
 
Jan. 29, 2010 - PRLog -- Portland, OR
pCapacity, a Portland, OR software products and consulting firm, announced this week that its latest product, Basecamp Viewer, is now available for free download.  Paul Irvine, founder and President of pCapacity, says “I’ve been a longtime fan of Basecamp. As a VP of Technology in the past, I usually had dozens of concurrent projects running, and Basecamp was great for cutting through it all to get to simple list management of who does what and when. The downside was that Basecamp had no real visual interface so it was hard to picture where everything was, especially across projects”.

Irvine says it was over three years ago that he started work on the concept. And eventually had the opportunity to work on it and develop the idea.  “We chose Excel as a development platform very carefully. When you are managing multiple projects, you need to be able to snapshot the current state, so a local ‘copy’ in Excel is ideal.  And project managers can share these easily. It can also be kept offline as  a point-in-time archive.”  As project wallcharts are typically large grids, using a spreadsheet as a base for the application makes it very easy and inexpensive to develop.  

When it first launched, Basecamp Viewer – BCViewer for short – was an Excel 2007 platform application.  Today it does now support Excel 2003 and 2007 on the Windows platform.  The Mac does not support the same versions of VBA and there is no plan at this time to offer BCViewer on the Mac Office 2004 or 2008 platforms.

Irvine says the Software as a Service version will be out in February 2010, and offer more visualization of Basecamp data, such as Todo Lists and Todo Items, and support editing of due dates and assignments. It will still be an Excel based application, but the licensing will be per basecamp account per month, and be a small percentage of your Basecamp account fee.   “It was never meant to replace the Basecamp user interface” says Irvine, “it was meant as a simple add-on to supplement Basecamp by providing a higher level visual that managers are used to. A wallchart view with simple red/yellow/green status on incomplete milestones”.   It is particularly suited to program and projects managers who have responsibility for multiple projects concurrently.

An important point that Irvine is keen to emphasize is that BCViewer has no data of its own. It truly is a viewer of existing Basecamp data.  There are a few other products which aim to offer a visual interface to Basecamp, but they require that you switch to them as your primary project management tool, and import or synchronize data with Basecamp.  BCViewer follows the Keep It Simple philosophy that 37Signals established.  It may not do everything, but it excels at the thing you need it for. This release of BCViewer is free, trivial to launch, and does not require you to adopt a new project management approach, or learn a new tool.  “Just about every project manager I know has at least got basic Excel skills” says Irvine.  “For those that want it, we’ll give you access to the raw data that we pull from Basecamp too so you can tweak it out any way you need it”.

For more information about Basecamp Viewer, visit the website at http://bcviewer.com pCapacity is based in Portland, OR, is the developer of BCViewer, offering software products, consulting services, and custom software solutions. Website at http://pcapacity.com.  Basecamp is a registered trademark of 37Signals LLC.  Excel is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.

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About pCapacity:
pCapacity provides tools and consulting services for software development VP's, CTO's and directors to develop rapid resource plans, project portfolios, and believable product roadmaps. This aligns the technology projects to support the business objectives. Basecamp Viewer provides Directors and Program/Projects managers with at-a-glance views of their projects in Basecamp.
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Source:pCapacity
Email:***@bcviewer.com Email Verified
Zip:97054
Tags:Basecamp, Visualizer, Wallchart, Gantt, Viewer
Industry:Software, Internet, Technology
Location:Portland - Oregon - United States
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