For the Force.com developer hackathon, I developed an integration toolkit between 37Signals‘ Basecamp application for project management and Salesforce.com. This little bit of work earned me the top prize in the Dreamforce 2009 Hackathon so a big thanks to Salesforce.com for putting on the event. It has easily become my favorite part of the Dreamforce conference.
Salesforce.com, in its simplest form, allows for the tracking of business leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and its development platform extends its functionality to include pretty much whatever a developer can come up with. For many organizations, these salesforce opportunities represent products that are being purchased by another company. What if, however, you are a professional services group? Your services are products in a sense, however the native salesforce.com functionality of products is fairly limited for use for professional services.
Enter Basecamp
Basecamp allows you to manage companies, projects and the various messages, to-do lists, milestones, files and time tracking for each project.
Your Basecamp is in my Salesforce
This Basecamp+Salesforce.com toolkit allows you to tie Salesforce opportunities to Basecamp projects right out of the box. The toolkit includes methods for all of the Basecamp API methods so developers can build their own applications using whichever Salesforce.com objects and business logic they desire using visualforce and apex code.
Due to the time constraints on the Hackathon competition, the toolkit requires a little bit of work on my part before I deem it ready for releasing to the Force.com Code Share.
Features
- Tie your Salesforce user account to your Basecamp user account
- Associate opportunities to existing Basecamp projects
- Create new Basecamp projects from within Salesforce
- Create, read, edit and delete project messages, to-do lists and milestones
- Manage completion of to-do lists
Considerations
Both Basecamp and Salesforce have methods for alerting users regarding upcoming tasks. The initial version of this integration relies on Basecamp’s notifications, which can be selected from within Salesforce.
Roadmap
Due to the short timeframe provided during the Dreamforce Hackathon there are a few Basecamp functional areas that were not written into the toolkit. I plan to add these items soon but they may not be in the first version released to the code share.
- Time tracking
- Writeboards
- Files
Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Salesforce.com, Dreamforce, 37Signals or Basecamp.
Tags: 37signals, basecamp, df09, dreamforce, forcedotcom, Salesforce.com
You never cease to amaze me with your salesforce.com fu. Congrats on winning. I hope they gave you a phatty prize.
Thanks Josh! It was a lot of fun and coming home with a MacBook Air made the conference even sweeter.
Congrats Colin, that’s awesome!
Sweet! Congrats man. The whole SF.com and Project Managing things is definately high on peoples needs list.
We are looking at possibly deploying basecamp and would love to assist you with making this ready for the community. We have apex dev staff so please let me know how we can help.
Colin:
We are looking to integrate SF+BC, in particular getting BC tasks into SFDC. Can we talk?
Great job! I just came back from Dreamforce with a head full of ideas and a Google search for Basecamp & Salesforce.com brings back your potential solution. Keep up the dev work, I’m sure I’m not the only one excited about this functionality.
[...] first product, Basejump, which I’ve talked a little bit about here will be available this month on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange and the Basecamp+Salesforce [...]
Thanks for the update. Please email me when it is launched.
This is exactly what I need for my company. How can I find out when it’s ready for market?
Hats off to people like you who create these ‘tools’.
Is this integration publicly available? My company could really benefit from this tool. Any idea when it might be released?
Unfortunately, the application is not yet publicly available. Client projects took priority but I’m back to work on getting this out the door. Fortunately, I will now be able to make sure that the app works well with the new Salesforce user interface.
This sounds exactly what a lot of people are looking for, I can;’t wait to see it in (public) action!
Great to hear it is still in the pipeline. Do you have any date in mind ?
We’ve been up to our necks in client work but I have made getting this out as soon as possible a priority.
Congrats on Dreamforce. We just implemented SF and BC…looking forward to connecting them together.
That’s a great idea and we have been looking for it for a while.
This is fantastic – will Chatter play a role in the integration at all? Very much looking forward to this…
Awesome work. Again, any date in mind?
I am very much looking forward to the release of your Basecamp + SalesForce toolkit. I have been looking for a good project management suite that can integrate with SalesForce. There are a few, but they are extremely expensive. Several of my developers have used Basecamp and love it. I hope you are able to give out a release date soon.
Colin. I’m one of the excited stalkers to this page. Any ETA on your tool set?
I too am excited about the toolkit. Please keep us updated on the progress.
I would be very, very interested in this. If I can help at all I would be glad to!