hey there Jason freed back again with another video today I'm going to walk through some of the new stuff in base camp 4. so we just shipped base camp for sort of officially yesterday we've been rolling it out over the past year but now it's available to everybody and it's a continuation of base camp 3 so all the great stuff that was in Basecamp 3 is also in four plus all this new stuff that I'm about to show you and there's other things that are in it that I'm not going to show you these are kind of the highlights but there's a quite a bit more as well so if you go to basecamp.com new you can kind of check this out yourself but I'm going to sort of walk through this page and then flip over to the app and actually show you the new things live in our own account so the first thing is we've completely redesigned the home screen which is the screen that you see when you log into Basecamp so let me just take you through hours so this is our account here at the top you have your logo this happens to be the 37 signals logo so it's our logo you put yours there make a new project we used to have an option to make a project or a team now it's just a single thing called make a project it's a lot simpler and clearer we also have now moved the invite flow right to the home page so before you'd invite people from within projects which was actually quite a bit complicated depending on if they were in the account yet or not we've elevated this so now you just click invite people we ask you what kind of person they are someone who works at your company an outside collaborator partner contractor or guest or a client and you go through that flow um and so those two things now are are much tidier below that we have a new section here at the top for pinned projects and you can pin anything you want and you can also reorder these pinned items pin projects of course stay at the top and they're kind of things that you're really sort of you want to be on top of so those just stick there at the top and then down below it's going to show you up to 16 additional recently visited projects now if you have a smaller account with fewer than 16 or so projects you're going to see everything there but if you're not you're just going to see some of these things and then down below that this is brand new you have your schedule on the left this is stuff that these are events that you're part of you're assigned to or you're uh you know scheduled for and on the right you have your assignments this could be to do items or other things that are assigned to you so your home page is now your PIN stuff a place to invite new people make a new project get to stuff that you've been bouncing in and out of recently and then finally down below your things that you really kind of want to be on top of so it's it's much more of like a dashboard bouncing off place than it was before we also have a really wonderful list view where you can zoom through all these things in different ways uh just in list view if you prefer to do that but the default view is this graphical View and also if you have fewer than just a few projects the cards are bigger so everything looks nicer for new accounts as well everything's sort of proportionally sized for the size of your account all right so that's the new home screen let's scroll down to the next thing now I'm not actually going to show you this because it's not officially launched yet although um actually you know what I will show you this because by the time you watch this video let's say you're watching it in a month or something you'll probably have this so I will take you through this briefly I'm also going to do an entirely separate video on this too we have a brand new feature called card table which has been a long time coming one of our top requests it basically brings kanban to Basecamp but with our own unique spin with a number of sort of practical twists to it so let me walk you through what that looks like I'm going to jump into product strategy which is a project that has um card tables in it again just for those who are uninitiated with Basecamp these are projects you click on one to go into it and of course by the way the people who are pictured here are the ones who are on it that sort of thing so I'm going to go into project strategy and you'll see here there's two card tables maybe a little bit of background actually be useful here too in Basecamp you have a series of tools that you can add to any project a project lives on a single page you've got these tools at the top and then down below you have a full history of everything that happened in the project in real time minute by minute so it's a wonderful way just to dive into something you can dive directly in or you can scroll down and get up to speed all on one page without having to go anywhere else in this case we have a chat we've got a place to store docs and files a message board for sort of announcements that we're sending out some to-do lists and then these card tables that's what I want to show you a card table is essentially like a kanban thing except it's a little bit different and that there's sort of this this what we call Triage space at the top where you can sort of dump things in without having to think about where they go yet just dump them in um and then down below you can drag them into these columns if you're ready to bring them into the workflow you can create as many columns as you want color them move things through Etc there's a lot more to this um as well but um that's essentially what the card table is I'll talk more about this in a dedicated video separately but that's in Basecamp 4. all right let's go down to the lineup brand new feature in Basecamp 4. so base camp historically hasn't really had a great bird's eye view of all the stuff that's has a start date and end date sort of laid out on a single timeline and now it does so it's called the lineup and if you click on lineup up here you'll see it this is what the lineup essentially looks like of course it's going to look different depending on what you have going on um but some fundamentals down the middle is a line This stands for today so I'm recording this video on Wednesday 28th of September 2022. this is today and then what you do is you map these projects that have start and end dates and I'll show you how to add those onto this so any project that has a start and end date will show up here on the timeline or I'm sorry on the lineup so you can sort of see where things are you can see we're like you know less than a quarter of the way through because these things move across the timeline as time goes on so you can kind of see how much time you have left and what's going on current projects that overlap with today um so the starting on date is between today uh shows up as as a big uh you know big row here essentially previous things that were completed that are still visible on the timeline on the lineup timeline are smaller here and if you had stuff planned in the future you'd see those as well plotted out here and again as many as you have you'd see them all it shows you the name of the project the description of the project who's working on it and the start and end date what's really nice about this view too is that let's say you need to push three projects forward by a week just because like you're running out of time and something isn't done you can just click the date assign a new date I'm not going to do this because this is actually live real information assign a new date and you can quickly reschedule things really really fast if you need to so that's what's really nice about the timeline but it's a wonderful way to get a picture of like what's actually in play right now when things started and when things have ended are going to end I should say to add a date to a project you simply go to a project and um you go up here and you say edit project details and you can pick a start date and an end date and if you have a start date or an end date you're going to see this little pill at the top of the project above the name that has a start date and the end date and again a vertical line denoting today so you can kind of see where you are when you're on a project and you can go to the lineup and see sort of the meta view across a variety of different projects so that is brand new in Basecamp 4 and it's a wonderful view for managers for anyone who just has to get a sense of where things are you know it's just right here and really wonderfully done and just happens automatically okay let's move down to ah this is a new feature called participation types and this is a wonderful little subtle thing but makes a big difference so um with Basecamp historically people are either on a project or not on the project so they either could access it or not and we've sort of added another option here for people um called called uh either on the project or just following let me show you how that works so I'm going to go back home here I'm going to jump into I don't know um mobile you'll see the mobile this particular project has these seven people that are on it so if you're on the project it's going to have um your avatar and then it says plus 71 just following okay so there's 71 additional people following this project that aren't actually working on it but they can see it and you'll see if you go to the setup people screen people who are on it have this orange pill and everyone else has just following and you can very quickly just change someone's status instantly and it makes a quick change we picked orange so there's a lot of contrast so as you scroll through you spot it if these were just words like just following are on you wouldn't be able to spot things quickly as you're scrolling down so and we're very careful about making sure the interface is very useful for people even without having to read you just kind of look and you see so that's what that is what's the difference if you're it says it all at the Top If you're on the project your avatar is going to show up at the top of the project it'll also show up on the home page and in the lineup um and you'll be notified when someone chats in one of the campfires you're also in a default notification group when new things are posted people who are just following won't hear from their project at all unless someone specifically at mentions them and signs them to something or Loops them into a thread so it's a really wonderful way to follow a project quietly without having to um get all these notifications that you don't want because you're not really involved but you still want to follow along so that's what participation types let you do doors uh doors is a really cool feature um let me show you doors so doors is a a way to bring the outside world into base camp historically again Basecamp had a series of tools or has a series of tools this happens to be a to-do list tool with a hill chart at the topic quite involved one to more to-do lists Message Board docs and files campfire schedule these were all built-in base camp tools but you might be using another product uh some third-party product or one or two or three with your project and it's nice that because base camp is the all-in-one one place to go the definitive resource for a project it's nice to be able to link off to the other things you might use right from base camp as well so let me show you what that looks like um I'm going to jump into actually let me jump into uh to mobile base camp here um so I'm in Mobile base camp which is another project we've got a message board campfire you'll see we also of course have Integrations you can pipe in external data into your campfire this is a campfire chat right so people can chat and you can quote chats and all that stuff as you'd expect and you can also pipe in data from GitHub or anywhere else you want we've got to-do lists we've got another to-do list this is the Android release to-do list and this is the iOS release to-do list got a schedule stocks and files we've got a card table in this one but you'll see here we've got two GitHub repos one for the bc4 Android repo and one for bc3's iOS repo so to add an external tool to your Basecamp account or to a base camp project because each project has its own set of tools you can go up here say change tools and as it says open a door and here's the menu of external services including internal services so if you want to link to another Basecamp project from within a base camp project there's a really nice easy way to do that figma Dropbox GitHub help Scout you know Google stuff airtable Adobe you name it it's all here teams Envision notion the whole thing um and of course if there's something that's not here you can ask us and we'll probably add it or you can um add an a separate one and to add one all you would do is you'd click the door and you would add the link to the thing you want and that will then add that door to the project so um really useful way to bring the outside world into base camp uh okay out of office uh you know kind of a standard feature but we didn't have it in base camp people were sort of hacking it so we said like let's look at how people are hacking it and build it in so internally at Basecamp people would sort of superimpose they'd take their Avatar and they'd edit it you know in in Photoshop or figma or whatever and add a little out thing at the bottom and so we thought that'd be kind of cool let's just build that in so um let me show you in fact you'll see here Jay is out so it says out underneath his Avatar now how did he get that well you go up to your avatar in the top right corner and you go to out of office and here I am and I'm in or I'm out and if I'm out out slides up over my avatar everywhere in base camp once you save this that little out thing would show up and you just pick the dates and between those dates you get the little out thing what's also cool is that um if someone tries to app mention you um actually in fact Let me let me let me do that so I'll just show you how this works so someone tries to app mention you I'm going to try to app mention J here so I'm going to go at J You'll see J is out until September 30. so you know if you're trying to reach out to Jay that he won't get this for a few more days in this case so it's a really nice thing to do it's the same thing is true if you try to assign someone work and they're and they're out it tells you how long they're out until so you don't have to guess so that's a really handy feature there um let's go down to the next thing don't forget so in Basecamp we have a single place where all your notifications flow in it's called the hey menu it's right in the middle and it's it's really nice all your notifications are here um these are unread notifications these are previous notifications things that I've read and then there's this new blog called don't forget sometimes there's a notification that you want to look at but later you don't want to lose it you don't want to leave it a new for you because you've already seen it so on any one of these you can hit this little don't forget icon and it'll just pop it down in the don't forget section so it never goes away even if you've looked at it it doesn't go away until you clear it out yourself so it's a really handy way to uh to to to make sure you don't forget something and you can do that with notifications that are in the hey menu you can also do it um uh in comments so let's say I'm looking at a comment somewhere I don't know something like this and there's some comment down here and I want to get back to uh Fernando about something I can just go boom and say don't forget that'll add it up into my hey menu and um here it is don't forget so now I click that it'll take me right back down to it and there it is and I can get back to Fernando later so that's brand new in base camp 4. repeating to Do's I'm not going to actually show you this because it's pretty straightforward but now to Do's can repeat and recur every week every day whatever you want to set up every 30 days if you have a bill to pay something like that you can set them to recur which is really handy also another big request um add multiple instances by the way can you tell there's a lot of stuff in base camp for I'm talking fast it's a lot of incredible stuff in the new version of Basecamp which is available today for everybody including all of our existing customers get it automatically um so uh now you can add multiple instances of a given tool so historically um let me just jump to a cool example here so historically um base camp projects had a single message board a single campfire chat a single section for today's a single place for docs and files and now you can add multiple instances of a specific tool so you can really customize things this these projects you can call these tools whatever you want so for example this here is a message board which we've renamed heartbeats and everybody posts their heartbeat which is something people do the team leads essentially do this every six weeks they summarize everything their team's been doing it's all in one place everybody in Basecamp can access it and we can see what's been going on across the company over time it's really wonderful so we have one for heartbeats we have one for kickoffs kickoffs are just sort of the opposite they're not summaries of the past they're projections of the future here's what we're working on over the next six weeks these again get posted centrally everybody in the company has access to this everyone gets a notification when something is posted so everybody knows what legal's working and what products working on what customer service is working on what customer success is working on what Finance is working on Etc wonderful way for us to keep all of this stuff by the way in a single project called what works we make a new one every year and there's some other things but you'll see this is two message boards Message Board one message board two and we rename them I'll show you how that works um so you can add another if you want to add another message board you can hit add another here and do that um I'm not going to do that right now but you can rename these as well to anything that you want so uh it's it's pretty handy so that's multiple instances of a specific Basecamp tool and um this is uh the the last thing I think I'm going to show you and actually two more things um I'm not going to have well I'll walk through it but it's not a big deal really except if you've used base camp it's a big deal um we've just radically simplified the process to add people to projects it's now a single field you just type people's names in um and you can add them to whatever I I don't really have a great example of of this um I'll just go here I'll say set up people I'll add people let's say I wanted to add Rosa just do that you know let's say I wanted to add Jay-Z just do that and and that's it before it was a much more involved form and this is just much much faster and also if you don't want to type people in you can click this link here and pull up a company and from that company I'll just pick up our pull up our company you can just check people off really fast if you just want to do it that way or you can add everybody or nobody or whatever really really really quickly and it's a major Improvement you can add a personal note if you want to so it's much much better way to add people to projects now and uh uh the last thing I'm going to show you on this screen is like we added doors to projects you can also now upload or essentially not really upload because these are cloud files but link to all sorts of different cloud services from within Basecamp so for example um I'm just going to go to a project that I know we have set up um right here and this is a docs and files section within the marketing paid media project and you'll see here we have a figma uh file it's not really a file it's on figma but what's cool about this is that not only can you post this this external link to this external service and it has the proper icon in the whole thing but you can discuss it down below so here's some creative that we're looking at there's some back and forth down below so we're talking about something that's somewhere else but we're using Basecamp in all of its fundamental conventions to discuss the thing here in base camp so we're not discussing it on figma which sounds like why wouldn't you want to discuss it on figma because the more you just spread your discussions out all over the place you can't know who said what where what's going on where should I go to talk about these things so we always talk about these things in base camp everything gets a dedicated page the creative might be in figma but the discussion and the notes are here in base camp the last thing I actually do want to show you is something that's not on this list yet and a lot more um is something called All Access projects so let me jump in let's see let me find a uh maybe a good example of this here we go um so you'll see there's a little tab up here called All Access it used to be in base camp that either you had access to a project or you didn't and then we added this participation type where you could be working on it or just following but now there's a new way to get to projects that you just want to mark all access meaning anyone in the company can join it if they want they don't need to be invited at all so you can turn that on inside a project you go to Project details and you can decide this project is invite only this is the default still invite only meaning only people who are explicitly invited can see it or you can turn into an all-access project and therefore anyone who has a link to the project who who looks at it on the list view on the home page anyone can just join the project whenever they want if they want to you can also allow just anyone from your company or or pretty much anyone else in the account contractors guess that sort of thing as well so if it's an all-access project it gets this all access tab if you hover over it it explains that and if it's invite only it just doesn't get the the tab at all so a lot of stuff I talked quickly um you can recap this on your own time if you want by just going to basecamp.com new and we'd love for you to try Basecamp for if you used to use Basecamp in the past and we've been around for basically it's been around for 18 years so a lot of people used previous versions and they haven't looked at it for a while some people have been with us the whole time but if you use this before and you haven't been with us for a while and you want to check us out now I think you're going to be very pleasantly surprised and impressed so we'd love to have you check us out come to basecamp.com sign up and give it a shot but if you just want to see a recap of everything that's new go to basecamp.com new and I hope this was uh helpful if you have any questions post them down in the comments below and looking forward to making another video for you soon thanks again for watching