At Delphic Sage, we love using Basecamp as our central communications hub between our staff and our clients. It's simple and easy to use, and has a permissions model that makes it well suited as a client portal. However, Basecamp lacks the granularity to be used for actual project/task management which is why we use a different system internally. One of the pain points for our project management team is that they often have to take messages or to-do items from clients out of Basecamp and copy them to our internal solution manually. After reading a bit about the Basecamp REST API, we devised a fairly clever way to make this happen more easily without subjecting/exposing our clients to the minutia of our internal task system.
Some Requirements
1. It needs to be quick and easy to selectively create a new intranet task based on a client entered To-Do item or message in Basecamp.
2. It needs to be easy to jump back and forth between the Internal Task and the Basecamp To-Do
3. The Client should not be exposed to the internal workflow / comments
The Solution
1. We used the BaseCamp API to allow project managers to simply create a new task based on the basecamp URL of an existing To-Do Item. Once the task was created, we prepended the To-Do in back camp with the intranet Task #.
2. We used a GreaseMonkey Script with JQuery to Link all task #s on BaseCamp To-Dos to the corresponding Intranet Task.
3. Since our clients will not have the Greasmonkey script, they will only see that there is a task number, indicating that the Basecamp To-Do has been escalated to an internal Task.
Read on for the step by step analysis...