(2006-03-31) Boyd Base Camp Unjoined Identity

Stowe Boyd on the broken Digital Identity model at BaseCamp - he needs a separate ID there for every group his collaborates in. Many times in the past few months, I have started a project up with a group, or groups, who like me are already using Basecamp. The problem that arises: Whose Basecamp implementation to use? I would, of course, rather manage projects that I am involved with in my own Basecamp instance, while the others have the same perspective. But what happens, quickly, is that I have a bunch of memberships in other Basecamp projects, which do not collate into a coherent single view. Basecamp lacks the notion of federating project work. While I can invite my pal, Greg Narain, to join a project I am running, Basecamp is only willing to consider Greg as another individual, not as the owner of his own Basecamp instance. As a result, Greg must login to my instance to participate, and the status of the project does not show up on his dashboard. Image the nightmare of tracking multiple To-Do List-s/Calendar-s.

• Jason Fried http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2006/06/jason_fried_on_.html |replied SalesforceCom is just as bad, though youi're probably less likely to be a member of multiple SFA "spaces". But we needed separate spaces for 2 very different markets (different custom fields, forms, use of API, etc.), and the few people who needed access to both spaces needed to use separate EMail addresses (which is the Digital Identity there) for each space! And of course, if you actually needed to manage Calendar events in both sets of leads, you'd go bananas. I have no idea how that would work if you were using their MsOutlook integration or custom Off-Line synch system...