At Engage, we’ve been using Basecamp for project collaboration for years. Just last Tuesday, Basecamp launched a new and improved version of the system. We upgraded our projects and found that the new Basecamp removes any remaining project management friction while making collaboration easier and more enjoyable. Here are five of many of my reasons you should upgrade to the new Basecamp ASAP.

1. Daily Progress Timeline

In a Facebook-esque timeline fashion, Basecamp provides everyone with a daily progress timeline that updates in realtime. Instead of just corralling information, you can see work as it happens and visualize organizational productivity top down or bottom up.

2. Personal Activity

One of my biggest complaints with the old Basecamp was how difficult it was to see all the activity of our team across projects and activity type. The new Basecamp lets you view an activity stream for yourself and everyone else on your team so you can get a snapshot of individual performance at any time. Love.

3. Centralized Project Emails

In the old Basecamp, you had to subscribe to project emails, one project at a time. Every morning at 8 o’clock, I would receive 30+ emails (1 for each project) with yesterday’s activity and updates. The funny thing is, I LOVED this feature because it allowed me to get a birds eye view of project activity. The new Basecamp combines all of these features into one morning email, broken up by project. This is one of my favorite new features of the new Basecamp and it’s a feature I didn’t even know I needed. #winning

4. Starred Projects

If you need to focus on certain projects over others for whatever reason (priority projects, favorite projects, larger projects, projects finishing this week), you can star as many projects as you want and they will be attached as boxes to the top of your projects list. I find that while there are 30+ projects in our Basecamp account, in a given week, I spend most of my time between 5-7. The new Basecamp allows me to visualize this distinction.

5. Interface & Usability

Perhaps the most noticed yet least discussed enhancement in the new Basecamp is its significantly updated UI. This interface is more elegant, only supported in modern browsers, and considerably more user friendly. In fact, while discussing whether or not I needed to schedule an EngageU (our internal learning sessions) to teach the staff how to operate new Basecamp, the general consensus was that it wasn’t necessary since after 15 minutes, you’re an expert user.

I’ve listed what I see as 5 of the top reasons to upgrade ASAP but there are countless other ones. We’d love to hear your favorites, so be sure to leave them as a comment below. Also be sure to check out basecamp.com to see the reasons they give or search twitter for #basecamp.

UPDATE: To-dos are great. Real time updated to-dos are better.

UPDATE: I was lucky enough to be one of the first people to respond to the Basecamp launch post and got to watch a webinar with the team at 37signals. They were taking questions through tweets with the #basecamp hashtag and one of my questions showed up even though it was (partially) a joke. Before I get bombarded with comments, yes I’m aware of how much of a nerd I am.

UPDATE: 37signals has literally written the book(s) on how to manage and market successful web applications. The fact that Jason Fried commented on this post and 37signals tweeted a link to this post is not only an honor but also testament to their mission.