We're closing in on a closed beta for joinbureau.com. Customer input will lead our development in the future, but we wanted to get started early with a general discussion.

Those of you who use a project management system currently: What do you use? Why do you use it? What are its top features? What are its short-comings?

Those of you who don't: Why? What is missing from available project management systems that has stopped you from using one (if any)?

For all: How do you feel about current pricing structures in available systems? How do you feel about integrated features vs separate products? (i.e. Basecamp and Campfire vs both in one)

Looking forward to the discussion and thanks in advance for participating.

I currently use the new and old Basecamp as well as Campfire. I think the former is priced okay but I find the $20/mo hard to justify some months. I don't mind separate apps as long as I (and clients) have only one login to deal with.

I use Basecamp because it's easy and it just works. When you have a client that gets it too, it's awesome.

Top feature for me is email integration. You can use Basecamp how you see fit in a way. I'm also digging to-do lists, though I really wish it synced with Reminders or Things on my iPhone. A pipe dream, perhaps...

Email is something we're chalking up as very important. I understand that for a project management system to have any effect in a typical office or with typical clients, it will need to work for people who may never login to the app beyond setup. They should be able to interact via email only. Not what we want as our primary customer of course, but something we know will come up.

I've been using Basecamp and a bunch of other separate tools for dealing with projects and that's what annoys me the most: each client has a different tool and expect me to use that tool. When I have like 5 projects going on at once, I might deal with 5 different PMSs.

Usually, I just ask clients not to include me in any of those as I keep them updated through e-mails and post files to dropbox and/or my own server, whichever they trust better.

Yes, e-mail is very important mostly because those tools rarely have decent mobile clients and replying/seeing stuff on the road is extremely important to me.

Also, some of them have their own messaging/warning/alerts/notifications system which will e-mail you when something happens so you can log in to said tool and do whatever you need. If I have to go into my e-mail to get that notification and then log in to the tool, I'd just rather be able to solve things right there on my e-mail client/service. Kinda like how Facebook lets you reply to a message by replying to the notification e-mail.

Awesome.

The "reply-to-notification" is currently cooked in. We knew it was a necessity.

I'm curious, though, what could be done to help with the fact that we'd be adding yet another PMS to the mix. We think our features/pricing will set us apart, but what can help ease the user-end of things?

If you could provide an easy way to import/export project settings from the big ones, that would be cool. I'm unsure if most PMSs have APIs and how flexible they are. Even if I would manually set my e-mail client to forward my Basecamp e-mails to "Klein's PMS" and it would parse the e-mail and include whatever is in it, it would be better than whatever we have now.

I dunno, e-mail is the shit, no matter what Google Wave people think ;)

Fernando, I like your point about importing/exporting, but I look at it from a slightly different angle. For me it's not so much about pushing and pulling to and from project management systems as it is tying my favorite project management system to the other components of my business.

APIs are definitely the way to do that. Harvest is one of my favorite business applications. A host of useful apps and tie-ins that work seamlessly with Harvest give it that much more value. Note the difference between Basecamp and Harvest; there are plenty of satellite apps for Basecamp, but Harvest provides true integration with apps you are likely already using.

I also agree re: email. Leverage it, don't fight it.

Great points Erik. I LOVE APIs.

The "Grand Plan" for our PM app is to have a Add On Marketplace where vetted developers can build functionality on top of our app, and offer it to our users, either free or for a small fee.

Think the app store for your PM software. We are also providing a rich API from day 1, that will allow for meaningful integration with our app.

You might want to check out Podio.com as they are doing what you suggesting with an app store, rich API. Not just a PM platform, however. They are now part of Citrix (the company).