Micah Walter

My new favorite thing is BaseCamp. BaseCamp is essentially an online community project planner. You can set up your various projects and invite clients and or employees to collaborate online. There are a few levels or permissions and privacy, so you can restrict certain users from seeing certain things.

I have already set it up to collaborate with a client who I will be doing a project for in the near future. I created the project, added their names and emails, and minutes later they were able to log on, read my messages, check out the to do lists and create milestones.

This is a great tool for any freelancer. The ability to collaborate and stay on the same page during a long term or ongoing project is really essential. I can also use BaseCamp to help organize my personal life. I can use it to keep track of goals, personal projects, and other deadlines.

It’s all online, and you can make up your own URL (with a few options for the domain). The interface is really nice and somewhat customizable. It even integrates with iCal and other calendar software so you can keep tabs on your projects from your laptop or PDA.

To set up one project, BaseCamp is free. I eventually saw the need to set up multiple projects, so I am trying out their Basic plan at $24 per month. So far it seems really nice. Check them out at http://www.basecamphq.com.

As I have been using Aperture more and more these days, I have sort of left iView Media Pro, one of my all time favorite apps, in the dust. Fortunately, this past weekend I discovered a really great use for iView.

As a freelance photographer I am also a small business owner. This means that I have to spend countless hours updating my books, paying bills, and sending out invoices. Since I don’t have (well not yet anyway) an office manager, I have to do all the bookkeeping by myself. This takes up time that could be better used creating images.

One of the things I have been trying to do in order to cut back on all this office time has been to go paperless. Not only is a paperless office good for the environment, but it also allows me to take my documents with me anywhere I go. In addition to making things more portable, a paperless office also makes my life much easier. I no longer have to file bank statements away in a cabinet, and I don’t have spend time looking for statements if I need to check some figure. Everything is right there on my computer, searchable, and readily available.

So, I decided to use iView MediaPro to organize my documents. Nearly everything I have is in PDF format. In the same way in which I organize my photos, I can use the power of iView to keep track of all of my bank statements, business contracts, receipts and more. I can also add keywords to each document making them that much more easy to locate.

iView does a really nice job with PDF documents. I can look through the documents in thumbnail form, and even look through an individual document’s pages. I can also easily open each document in Acrobat, and iView keeps track of where each document exists on my hard drive.

Yet another use for Digital Asset Management software!