We have just uploaded 36 new video tutorials to the help section of this site. These cover all the features that are currently present in DeskAway (except for DeskMail) and should make it even simpler for your team to make the most of using DeskAway. Enjoy & learn!

In this tutorial I will show you how you can use your BlackBerry device to send a task to yourself and have it automatically show up in your BlackBerry Calendar. I will assume that you use Google Apps - especially the Google Calendar.

I assign a lot of to-dos to myself during the day and have recently started using the DeskMail feature. When I send a task out via email (through my BlackBerry), I would also want it to show up in my BlackBerry Calendar so that I can keep a track of it’s due date while I am traveling.

So, here it is. Follow these simple steps and you will soon be able to see your tasks on your BlackBerry Calendar…

Google Apps For Blackberry
Ok, so the first thing you need to do is to setup Google Apps for your BlackBerry. The entire suite of Google Apps for BlackBerry can be downloaded from m.google.com.

Google Sync - Google Calendar to BlackBerry Calendar
Google Apps comes with a Sync tool that will let you sync your BlackBerry Calendar with your Google account. After you run Sync (manually for the first time, and set it to run automatically thereafter) you should see your Google Calendar events on your BlackBerry Calendar.

Subscribe your DeskAway Calendar to your Google Calendar
Next, we want to subscribe to our DeskAway Calendar from Google Calendar. Follow the steps here.
Your DeskAway events should start to show up in your Google Calendar and the next time the Sync happens, they should start showing up on your BlackBerry Calendar as well.

That’s it. You are almost done. Lets test this out. Add a task to yourself with a due date either from your DeskAway account or using the DeskMail feature. Again, make sure you put the due date on the task. Check to see if it shows up on your DeskAway Calendar for that date.

The next time Google Sync runs, you should see this task on your BlackBerry Calendar on the day it was due! The task traveled from your BlackBerry, your DeskAway account, Google Calendar and finally to your BlackBerry Calendar! Even when people in your team assign you tasks, they would now show up on your BlackBerry Calendar. Great way to be on top of your tasks when you are mobile.

Hope this works for you. Feel free to drop me a line if you have suggestions or issues getting this started.

DeskAway got reviewed on Web2 and More by Kevin Cumbria.

Setting up a project and allocating responsibilities is simplicity itself. Once the project has been created you can choose the team which is going to work on the project, create a list of people and organisations which team members may wish to contact as part of the project.  Other facilities are a calendar which contains timeline information, a reports function which shows project progress in easy to read chart format and, quite brilliantly, an internal blog.

The inclusion of the blog function shows how much thought the DeskAway development team have put into this facility.  It’s all very well having tasks etc allocated and being able to check progress but even in remote, collaborative working the human element is important, a simple but vital tool to keep team members communicating with each other.

Thanks Kevin!

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!