Lighthouse

I have used and reviewed a long list of social media-based work management solutions, including Basecamp (see Basecamp and the Federation of Work), IBM Quickr (see In The Time Of “Me First”: IBM Slowr?), GoPlan (see GoPlan), and recently Huddle (see Todoist and Huddle: This Week’s Work Management Tools).

Now, I have bumped into another contender, a lightweight but extremely usable tool called Lighthouse, from ActiveReload.

In basic form, the now familiar Basecampish model is reused: major project information silos being directly mapped to tabs, a right hand panel to select from various projects, a dashboard summarizing status of all projects.

Here we see the dashboard:

Here is a project overview:

Note the various (garish) colors indicating different types of information added to the project. (I have recommended a different color palatte.) Each project has its own secure RSS feed. I find the secure limitation a problem, as I am less security conscious than most. They should make it a toggle.

Basic ‘messages’ (posts) are used for project collaboration:

Files can be attached to messages (and to tickets), and once they are uploaded, the files appear in the right sidebar when viewing the messages (or tickets). Unlike Basecamp, there isn’t a separate ‘Files’ silo, and no versioning is supported.

Strange that Lighthouse doesn’t support tags on posts, but they do so on ‘tickets’ which are Lighthouse’s version of tasks. It is in the area of tickets that Lighthouse really shines:

Note in the above that tickets can be associated with milestones (like Basecamp task lists), have a status (open, resolved, invalid (?), and on hold), and have comments.

Once milestones are created they appear as tabs, and clicking these tabs opens a panel with any associated tickets. A ‘prioritize’ feature allows reordering.

There is an extensive integration with tickets and email that I have not explored, but in essence the status of ticket can be updated by replying to system generated emails. New tickets can be created by emailing Lighthouse, again somethign I have yet to experiment with, but which looks promising.

Conclusions

Lighthouse lacks a number of features that Basecamp offers, such as writeboards, Chat, and time ranges built into tasks.

However, in my case, I never use Basecamp writeboards, because Textile is annoying, and is applied inconsistently across the application. My collaborator, Marjolein Hoekstra, tried the Lighthouse mark-up language, and found it perhaps equally painful, but I generally stick to text and HTML, which seems generally to work in Lighthouse, such as links. (I did encounter a headache with ‘blockquote”, which is styled with a leading quote. Would be good if Lighthouse allowed us to redefine the CSS style sheets.)

Re: Campfire style chat — I use so many other tools for chat, like Gtalk and AIM, that Campfire has never been a big draw for me. Others, of course, swear by it.

Re: time tracking — My work is based on relatively large time chunks (days, generally, not hours) so collecting time from tasks or tickets is not a real need. However, this is an area where a small tweak — adding another field for time expended — could add a lot of value.

So, for me, Lighthouse implements the subset of Basecamp that I actually use. It hasn’t countered some of the flaws in Basecamp — the lack of federation, the orientation toward desktop docs not web docs, etc. — but it has simplified things a bit.

Considering the slimmed-down nature of the app, however, the price is not slim:

Because of Lighthouse modules that support integration with other applications (like Subversion), their support for user-accesible APIs, and the opportunity to support public projects (where anonymous users can create tickets and track their status), the product is really not intended as a lightweight replacement for Basecamp, as I have tried to pigeonhole it. It is really a straightforward issue management tool which happens to overlap in part with Basecamp.

I would really like tags on messages, so that I could bring up both messages and tickets related to an issue, but I can live with it as it is. (At least for a little bit, while I am waiting for the millennium…)