Hi everyone. I’m toying with an idea that might hopfully help more than just me. What my main issue has been so far is that 90% of my projects usually can be handled with just email. As there’s usually 1 or 2 people involved, and 1 decision maker, it’s all pretty easy to CC everyone and get the job done.
But there are random projects that come up from time to time that have 4 or 5 people involved and maybe even a person or two from another company in the mix. In these cases, I’ve found getting everyone to collaborate with something like Basecamp is REALLY difficult. Basecamp-esk systems seem to be geared toward an internal team that are all using it all the time for everything and in that case it makes much more sense. Getting 5 different people with different backgrounds to use it is frustrating to say the least.
So I’ve really been poking around for some kind of solution that’s between email and a basecamp level system. What I’m really after is something like this – a forum, or thread, that you can open up for a project. And then you would invite the 5 or 6 people to it. And people would contribute and upload images, thoughts, etc, and the thread would email everyone involved whenever someone posted something. The email would include the link to the thread.
The goal would be that with the simplicity of the single thread would keep people engaged and the communication would flow kind of like a gmail email thread.
My main thought is possibly doing a super custom skin of something like Vanilla or phpBB. But my knowledge of either of these is not all that high, so I was wondering if someone else know if either of these could actually handle it.
What do you guys think? Is it a dumb idea? Am I reinventing the wheel? Does it sound feasible or is it more trouble than it’s worth?
