Natalie A. Schloesser from Unchartered Shores, was kind enough to share her team’s experience with DeskAway. Read more to find out about their company and how they use DeskAway to manage and track their web projects.

Unchartered Shores is a website design and development company focusing on small to mid sized businesses. They spent months searching around for the perfect project management software; even subscribed to a different one for awhile. Once they got into the DeskAway interface, they knew it would be perfect for their company! No more searching for emails or files in our inbox, everything is all in one place - wrapped up in one neat little package for our contractors all over the world to see.

1. How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team?
We use DeskAway to manage our website design projects and keep in contact with contractors around the world. It has increased communication between the steps - from sales, to designer, to developer, to the people that maintain my cloud servers. DeskAway makes any project information easily accessible at any time; preventing the sending and re-sending of emails.

2. Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
Yes! I researched project management apps for months, tried 2 different ones, “settled” on one for about a year, but continued to look because we weren’t completely happy with its functionality and interface. DeskAway changed all that; it fits perfectly with our needs.

3. Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
Very little, if any! My team finds it extremely intuitive and easy to use. From contractors that had not used a project management app before, to those who had used our previous app, they all found the transition to be quite smooth.

4. What features does your team use the most?
Messages, Docs, and Files.

5. Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway? How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability or improving efficiency?
Absolutely! We are definitely emailing less, and personally when I receive a message from a team member via DeskAway, I find it easy to login, answer any questions, and then delete the email - knowing it’s saved in DeskAway. DeskAway itself is extremely cost effective, and as a whole has improved our efficiency as a team.

Thank you DeskAway!

Last month, we had updated permissions for the ”Contact’ functionality:

The Contact tab will also not be available to people outside your company. Only Super & Regular users from your company will be able to see the contacts tab.

If you are a user and are not able to see the Contact tab then all you have to do is to set your company name to that of the company name originally set while creating the DeskAway account. Here is how you can do this (or see this video):

1. Login and goto the Team tab
2. Edit the user and click on the ‘Yes’ option in the ‘Is this person a part of COMPANY NAME‘
3. Save changes & logout and log back in.

You should now have access to Contacts.

New Milestone Page

A whole new Milestone page. We scraped the old table format as it was not useful in differentiating between Overdue, Ongoing and Completed Milestones. We think that this new format is more user-friendly. Check it out and let us know what you think.

At-a-glance view of Overdue Milestones, Tasks and Issues

From the Project Overview page, see what’s delaying your projects by keeping track of everyting overdue (Note - we have removed the Last 3 Days, Last Week & Last Month links). Even the main dashboard page will now show you a snapshot of whats due today so you know what you have to do or whom to track down when you login!

New Colored Labels

With numerous milestones, tasks, issues etc. within the system, it was becoming harder to identify one from the other when everything was written in the same text style. Hence, we went ahead and created colored labels which will now help in identifying a task from an issue or a milestone. Much more visually appealing!

Enjoy a little more visual appeal from today