A moment of panic....

We recently had a Basecamp user call us with a hint of panic in their voice. They had been working with a consulting company that used Basecamp as the means for most of the communication with this person's company and as the mechanism to exchange all files that were deliverables as part of the consulting engagement. Well, as sometimes happens, the relationship wasn't quite working out and the man on the other end of the phone was desperate to get all of the data and files out of the Basecamp account before the consulting company was able to remove his access to the data. With Basecamp a company can grant access to a project to another company in order to collaborate on a project, this is typical for consulting companies to do with their clients. This man was looking to get a copy of all of his data and files for the work he had paid for over the past 2 years in order to have a copy of it all, as well as to have a record of communications in case the worst case should find the parties in court.

He was able to use Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp to export all of the todo's, messages, comments, files, & writeboards from Basecamp and have a local copy delivered to his desktop via Dropbox syncing. He was so excited to have this done so quickly and seemed relieved to know that he had a copy of everything that had become so important to his business. They had been using Basecamp so extensively with this consulting company that they didn't even realize how important the data had become to them and he didn't want to risk not being able to access it should the relationship further sour.

Customer Feature Request Product Release

We recently released a number of features and bug fixes to our core engine which were primarily based on customer feedback for both feature requests and bug reports. We’re pretty excited to be hearing so much from our customers and we’re always excited to be able to release software that is directly driven by what our customers want. This latest release includes the following:

• A fix to the way that we name files and directories and syncing that up with the way that we link them in the html exports. The issue was that we had some casing problems where we linked to a lower case directory name when the directory was actually camel cased. This only caused problems for our customers who are on Unix based systems where directory linking is case sensitive. Having come from Sun Microsystems and working exclusively on Unix systems for years, I feel bad that this one was missed, but working on Windows these days made this one slip by us unnoticed.
• We had a number of customers request that we add author information to the html exports for messages. We had limited what we put into the html exports with an aim of getting them released earlier. We’re open to any other enhancements that customers want to see there.
• We discovered a bug on exporting Basecamp messages from projects that are in an archived state. This was causing us to not receive the message body and so we printed out an empty message body in the html exports. We poked around and figured out how to extract this information from Basecamp.
• A recent (unannounced & undocumented) change by the Basecamp team was causing us to hit a rate limiting threshold on the API access we make to backup user data. We put in some workarounds and fixes so that we won’t hit that any more. This was simply causing our service to continually have to wait for a 20 second timeout period until we could make additional requests. With these new fixes we are now able to complete backup jobs much more quickly.

Please let us know if you have any additional feature requests. We love hearing from our customers.

 

We’re working on some new account management features now as well as an integration with Highrise for backing up all of that data.