This was one of the most widely requested feature in the last 6 months and we are finally bringing it to you by the name of DeskMail!

DeskMail is a service by DeskAway that helps you communicate with your projects via email. DeskMail will allow you and your team to add tasks and reply to task comments via email. If you are using email on your smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry etc.) you can easily email out tasks to your team members (just like you would normally) and still have a copy of it stored on your DeskAway account. When people reply to those tasks (by sending you an email), new comments are added to the task on DeskAway and the entire communication thread can be tracked within your projects.

In a nutshell, this is how it works…

What really led us to designing DeskMail?

We observed that email is still very very popular for task delegation and project communication (especially on smartphones with email support). People were adding tasks from DeskAway but were using email to comment and update others. Hence, the communication was broken up into 2 channels, DeskAway and email, making it hard for everyone to follow what was happening within a particular task. If the comment was sent via email, it was not stored on DeskAway and hence making it hard for the project manager to locate it. With the feedback we received, we decided to let people communicate with DeskAway via email aka DeskMail.

Why the name DeskMail?

We went through a series of names and even polled our followers on twitter. Keeping in mind future enhancements and features we decided to go with DeskMail - short and sweet, easy to pronounce and like the fact that the ‘away’ in DeskAway gets swapped with ‘mail’ (in this case, sending emails away to DeskAway).

Check out our help page for instructions on using DeskMail. In the coming months, we will be extending DeskMail to Issues and Messages as well. Thank you for your continued feedback and do keep them coming. Cheers!

The one word that popped in my head after I watched Star Trek yesterday was ‘Teamwork’. Each and every one on USS Enterprise worked towards a common goal of destroying the enemy, surviving and saving planet Earth. It was a story of “us” rather than I. It was “you” before “me”. It was about looking at the bigger picture (of saving humanity) rather than what will happen to me?

I found these insights and hidden meaning crucial and important to all of us working with teams. Many times we don’t work as a team, go our different paths and fail to understand the purpose of our project; which ultimately leads to failure. This movie clearly demonstrates that working in a coherent team is the only way to survival or in our terms, completion of a successful project.

If you haven’t watched the movie then go watch it. It’s super!

If you are interested in Indian Startups & Entrepreneurship, Proto is the place to be.  Over three years, Proto.in events have become a major support platform for upcoming startups and a source of inspiration for budding entrepreneurs.

The next edition of Proto is being held in Pune on July 25th 2009 at the Devang Mehta Auditorium. The passes are available at our office in Mumbai. 400 seats are available and filling fast. Each pass costs INR 750/-.

If you register before 20th June you get a INR 100/- discount. You can also register online.

Do get in touch with us if you require a pass! Thanks.

“It’s time to re-invent knowledge work” from HBS is a good article we came across which we would like to share with our readers. It will help you start thinking about your teams - Are you investing in new ways of doing work? Does your high-performance teams have the right tools and solve new problems in new ways under time and resource constraints? Are you tapping into the new ways to gather, share and collaborate on information?

Check it out and let us know what you think.