Working with a team requires some organisation. This is the first of a series of blogposts on the way get2future collaborates on projects with clients.
Backpack
Backpack is a web-based collaboration tool developed by the team at 37Signals. It helps us gather and share information on various topics, including design, code and projects. When working on projects that require client input, we use Basecamp. This tool will be covered in a future blogpost. Backpack is used for all the small bits and pieces that we need to share with each other: Photoshop templates, design inspiration, jQuery snippets, … are all shared within the team on backpack’s pages.
What’s a page?
A page is a blank canvas that let’s you organize any type of information. To-do lists, notes, files and images can be added to a page so everyone can use them. This is what a blank Backpack page looks like :
blank page
And this is what a typical Backpage page looks like when the team has posted some information :
Example page taken from backpackit.com
The nice thing with these pages is that whenever you change something and hit save, another person on the team can refresh the same page on their account and get the new info instantly. IM is good 80% of the time, when we just have to share small info that is needed now and can be lost in time tomorrow, but backpack is good for info that we need every now and then. We know it’s there, and we know it will stay there until we delete it.
The power of tags
Backpack lets you tag pages. Tags is a nice way of categorising information: let’s say I created a page named “Photoshop templates” and another named “Design inspiration”. I could tag them both with “Design”, so that I can find these pages faster when filtering my pages list. But the real power of tags reside in the fact that you can add a tag to your sidebar, which provides fast access to the information you need.
Sidebar with tags
Find everything you need to accomplish a good job!
In Backpack, the “Three click rule” is always respected. Once we know an information is available on a page, we have several ways -pages list, tags & search- to retrieve it, and it’s always found in less than three clicks. We have been testing this for a few weeks now, and the results are quite promising: info gets added to backpack nearly every day.
