
Moving from Basecamp to ActiveCollab - blasdel
http://allinthehead.com/retro/347/moving-from-basecamp-to-activecollab
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ams6110
Interesting little aside in this post, where he talks about hitting a license
threshold on the number of projects and this triggering an evaluation of
whether they really like Basecamp enough to pay more for it. I'm wondering if
this would have happened if the pricing model was a much smaller increase per
project. If adding a project is just a small additional cost there is no
"threshold" you hit where you have to jump to a noticeably more expensive
license.

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diN0bot
pivotal tracker is the best.

pivotal tracker site: <http://pivotaltracker.com>

my own blog post on initial reaction to using pivotal tracker:
[http://proudly.procrasdonate.com/project-management-and-
moti...](http://proudly.procrasdonate.com/project-management-and-motivation/)

a follow-up post: <http://proudly.procrasdonate.com/retrospective/>

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jmount
Congrats on finding a way to move off Basecamp. Despite the 37 Signals halo-
Basecamp was, in my opinion, a pretty crummy user experience from the start.

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antidaily
Clearly you haven't tried out ActiveCollab.

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bfung
What is bad about the user experience with ActiveCollab?

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hypermatt
I have to admit Basecamp is really underfeatured, no matter how they want to
sell it. But the cost having my own hardware installing and managing it, even
if its just 1-2 hours of my time is more expense then a year of Basecamp or
one its competitors as a hosted. service.

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drewmclellan
I absolutely understand the principal there, but the reality is that it took
me less than 30 minutes to be fully up and running with aC, using hardware
that was already online running our subversion server. A light bit of
tinkering for a Sunday evening - I don't anticipate any further ongoing
investment in maintaining it. It's just PHP, so it should run and run.

That said, this wasn't directly a cost-saving exercise for us. That's just a
nice by-product.

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hasanove
Yeah, only 30 mins. And just pray that you wouldn't need backup, that you did
not set up. Or that nobody breaks in through hole that you did not patch in
php, web server and whatever else you had to install.

Self-hosted solutions requires maintenance even if you don't anticipate it.
It's not "just PHP". It feels like a zero cost (you have got the spare
capacity server after all), but only until you hit a problem.

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drewmclellan
ActiveCollab has built-in daily backup to dump everything to disk in a
recoverable form, and then the server itself is backed up. If I wanted to go
crazy I could spend another minute adding the files to the cron job that syncs
data up to S3.

Of course there's a chance that it'll involve a bit of maintenance at some
point, and that'll soak up a bit of my time. My experience with hosted
solutions is that they have far more frequent hosting issues resulting in lack
of access to data (be that scaling problems, being offline for maintenance,
bad deploys etc) which soak up lots of time for everyone on the project.

When I'm in control of the situation I know that at least in a bad case
scenario I can spin up another server, grab the last good backup and be up and
running again within the hour. That has a lot of value.

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officemedium
Business Pundits "Top 10 Biz Collaboration Web Tools"

[http://www.businesspundit.com/the-10-best-collaborative-
web-...](http://www.businesspundit.com/the-10-best-collaborative-web-tools-
for-business/)

