Today I subscribed to Stowe Boyd’s blog after finding it via a signal vs. noise entry and the first blog entry was titled “Basecamp and the Federation of Work”.

In the article Stowe is compaining about the fact that he has to have several logins to Basecamp, because some of the projects he is involved in are owned by others. Basecamp doesn’t have what he calls a “Federation of Work” model, where you can login to Basecamp once and have access to your own projects as well other people’s projects that you have access to.

This is something that I’ve always found annoying too, so last year when I started working on Callbx I decided that people need to have consolidated access to their own groups and other groups that they have been invited to join.

Callbx is a help desk/ticketing application that I’m gearing specifically for smaller companies and consultants. Consultants especially, often work for several companies at once and may need to be able to login to several groups in Callbx to support their clients. To have to open separate browser windows, each logged into a different account wouldn’t be much fun.

My brother and I were discussing various aspects of Callbx this weekend and I told him I was thinking of trimming out the federated account stuff in order to prep Callbx for the public launch more quickly. But, after reading Stowe’s article I decided that it really is critical to have it from the beginning, even if it does take longer to get it out the door.