My Profile plays an important role in Social Collaboration. It reflects your personal & educational profile to all your team members (some of whom you may have never met!).

1. There is a sub link “My Profile” under the “My Account” link on the top right of the page.

2. Clicking on the “My Profile” sub link takes you to the “Update Your Profile” page.
3. Here, you can upload your photo from the left panel - add more personalization to yours and your team’s DeskAway experience.
4. You can also add your blogs, social website urls (Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) and even tag yourself with different skill-sets that you may have.

Great! Check out how your profile looks now. You can change your profile anytime you wish

For a long time in my life I have struggled to maintain all my contacts in one place, from where I could access them at any time, from any where. Usually, I export the contacts from outlook onto a .csv file or would export all contacts with my mails as a .pst with a plan to maintain all of them in one spreadsheet. But unfortunately, nothing ever happened. The result - I found myself toying with 4 different files fishing out relevant contact details, as and when, if at all.

I started using DeskAway in the second half of 2008 and found that they have an answer to my problem - a “Contacts” section where:

1.  I can Import my contacts from my mail client or anywhere outside either as a .csv file or a .txt file
2.  I can Add a Contact directly to DeskAway
3.  I can Export all contacts onto a .csv file which I can keep as a backup on my machine and export it onto my mail client

Ever since, I’ve been trying to get all my scattered contacts onto DeskAway and manage it in a better fashion, but in vain. So, recently I told myself that I have to get this over and done with before 2008 ended! So, one of those days in December I got all the files I maintained my contacts in together and:

1. Exported the contacts as .csv files having the following column heads:

[First Name], [Last Name], [Email], [Designation], [Mobile], [Office], [Extension], [HomeNo], [Fax], [Address]

2. Imported the contacts .csv file onto DeskAway:

Under the Contacts Tab, there is Import Contacts option. You can upolad the .csv files from here on to DeskAway. Once you upload a file, all contacts will be labeled as Personal Contacts.

Upload contacts onto DeskAway by importing a .csv or .txt file

3. Organized my contacts: I accessed the contacts I had uploaded through the View Contacts option and edited the contacts by adding labels to each of them. Adding Labels is really helpful in organizing contacts. Say, you were at the MacWorld expo in San Francisco this year and you would have met quite a few interesting people, potential partners, etc there. You can create a label named “MacWorld Expo 2009″ and have all those contacts under this label, making it easy for you to access them later.

Edit individual contacts from the Personal Contacts view

Edit Contact and add relevant Labels, Add Company Name, etc.

4. Assigned Permissions: I “Shared” a few contacts with everyone in my team, so that they could benefit out of that contact. For a few contacts, where I wanted my team to know I know that particular person, but did not want to share the contact, I checked the Lock Sensitive Data option. This lets others know of the contact name, but hides other critical details. I also used the other permission based sharing options that DeskAway has, which I personally think is a great time saving tool and very well thought of.

Assign Permissions and lock sensitive data while sharing contacts

I am now glad that I actually got to organize all my contacts on DeskAway. My team accesses the contacts they want out of my list and I don’t have to look through four different files. Most of all, earlier I only looked back at contacts of people who I may have met in the recent past - as it was memory dependent. But now, all it takes is a lookup related to the relevant Tags, company name or first name / last name and I can sift through all the contacts I have at once. A great tool that compliments the efforts of networking and helps put it to use!

Late last year (2009) DeskAway was featured in India Web 2.0 when we released a twitter-like feature, BaseEscape & new enhancements to the interface. Read the entire article here.
Thank you Vardaan & India Web 2.0

We start 2009 with some cool features to enhance your DeskAway experience (yup, we were working and busy during Christmas/New Years). Check them out and tell us what you think! As always, thank you for your feature requests and suggestions.

User Reports

All along you have tracked team member activity within each project. There was no one place to see what Tina worked on across all her projects. How many  hours has she contributed and what tasks/issues does she have pending?

User Reports (Summary as well as Detailed) gives you a central place to track work by any of your team members. Filter, print or export these reports to a spreadsheet.

(Click on a team member’s name on the Reports page)

(Summary Work Report Page)

(Detailed Work Report Page)

My Work Report

Easily track your work across all your projects. In addition to the email reminders, this will give you a heads-up on what you have overdue.

(Access your report from the My Work Report link under Projects)

Silent Projects & Better Control of Email Notifications

We received feedback that after creating a project there were just too many emails going out to every team member. For example, whenever you added a new Milestone, the person assigned to the Milestone got an email. When a task was completed, an email was automatically sent out. To some, this was annoying. Hence, we now give you better control of email notifications within your projects from the Add/Edit Project page.

1. Mark a project as Silent if you do not want any emails to trigger when adding/editing/deleting or commenting on anything within the project.

2. Mark a project as Email-enabled and have better control of when to trigger email notifications.

Its easy to switch between these two options anytime. Tip: When creating and setting up a project for a future date, its better to set it as a Silent Project. When the project is setup and ready to go live, change it back to the Email-enabled option. Your team members will appreciate this.

(Setup Silent or Email-enabled projects by editing a Project)

(This icon denotes a Silent Project)

Super Users + Account Owners can see all Projects

Super Users will be able to see and keep a track of all projects from the Project Listing page. They will not be able to access any projects that they are not a part of. Better control of what’s happening within the DeskAway account and making sure that another Super User is not creating projects that are not needed and hence taking up the total active projects limit.

(Super Users can see all project but cannot access certain projects)

Global Control of Email Reminders

From the Settings tab, Super Users will be able to set personal email reminders for all the other project team members. See someone slacking off? Turn on his/her email reminder.

(Settings Tab - Set individual email reminders)

User-Interface Enhancements

All page headings and text is now bolder and sharper. We got away with the lighter grey shades that were a bit too hard to read.

(New Interface Changes)

Want to know more about DeskAway’s Founder & CEO Sahil Parikh? Check out the latest Express Computer Hot Seat profile on his blog here.