A few days I logged into my Basecamp account to be greeted by a new page…bascially they are stopping support for IE6! Ok, so more and more people are on IE7, Safari, Firefox with Chrome coming soon but I was still surprised.

I had read a few articles recently where users had come across websites which no longer supported IE6. Ill still be able to view Basecamp via another browser but it got me thinking about a lot of our customers. Many of the organisations we work with still use IE 6, if they are in big companies IT roll-outs can take time.

I understand why people aren’t continuing to support IE6…I have it on my machine as I’m the company IE 6 tester…but it did get me thinking about how websites could fail to be supported on a browser in a matter of months. Could we reach a situtation where developers are coding sites for specific versions of browsers with the user selecting their browser before they enter the website? I’ll be watching what happens with code standards and the increasing number of browsers coming online.

It has been about 6 months since we started to use Basecamp. After years using Project and creating massive Gantt charts that were:

Hardly ever read

Rarely updated

Over about 20 pages when printed

We made the decision to use Basecamp. It doesn’t have all the features of project but we’ve found the functionality elements of emailing, file uploads and chat more than make up for some of its limitations. We’ve foudn our own way of using it and it is working well for our clients who can get an instant update and get email notifications.

I’ll still revert to project when there is a ‘big’ project to plan with lots of depedencies and critical path as Basecamp doesn’t allow this at the moment but basecamp is proving popular.

The real winner for me was the instructional videos. I think that they are excellent, we’ve used them in our project manager training and they have also saved loads of time when we’ve brought the client into Basecamp. As they are always available you can revert to them at anytime. Chatting in the office we can’t recall a piece of software that was so simple to use but delivered so much in terms of efficiency and business improvement.

I’ll always have project on my machine but it is basecamp that I’m using day to day.