Alex from afrison.com compared 5 to-do programs and gave DeskAway a great review:

“The free version is limited to 3 projects, but you can upload up to 25MB of files. Which is not possible in most programs for free.

And again, this is another program with a lot functionality. With new, fresh ideas I didn’t see on any other program. Good for team work, easy to assign tasks to someone else. DeskAway includes a blog, nice calendar, internal and external contact list, report functionality, project status and much more.

Positive:
As you can read above loads of functionality. Additional you can set Milestones and assign tasks to a milestone, which have to be completed before reaching this milestone. You can also set priority, time of task and you can upload 25MB of files.

Negative:
No recurring function. In free version limited to 3 projects. But if you are clever, you can handle milestones as project and assign tasks to it. So there won’t be a limit. But if you think it’s worth it to use, you should just go ahead and upgrade. Besides that I can’t really see any other negative spots.

Conclusion:
After I checked it shortly the first time, it really surprised me when I checked it out further. The development team thought through every step. Almost no lack of good usability or any other flaws. For every pro user a must try out and I’m sure some user will stick with it.”

Read more about it here

Besides some small fixes and enhancements, this is what we were working on in the last 2 weeks:

Calendar
- Added a left panel which instantly shows you what is due today (events, projects or milestones)
- Moved the iCal subscription links (from an inner page) to the left panel on the Calendar page - saves you one click!

Messages
- Ability to choose which people on your project team you wish to notify via email. Earlier, everybody on the team would get an email whenever someone added a new message or commented on an earlier message.

Tasks
- The person adding a comment to a task can choose to notify other people involved in the task via email. Earlier, everybody would get an email when a new comment was added.
- Ability to mark a task as “Ongoing” by clicking on the task name and then clicking on “Mark as Ongoing”. This will help others know that you are working on this task.

Files
- When uploading multiple image version files, updating the thumbnail image (on the right side of the File page) to display the image of the latest image uploaded.

I came across an interesting article at the Computer Business blog:

Gartner predicts software as a service technology for the future:

By 2012- At least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license. With software as service (SaaS), the user organisation pays for software services in proportion to use

Read all other predictions here: Gartner predicts the future of technology

In this article from MyCustomer.com, Bill Gates touches on how software has made people more productive, from email to collaboration & workflow and the future of software as a service.

Read all of Stuart Lauchlan’s article here: The final countdown of Bill Gates