Some of you found the permission structure of DeskAway a bit rigid for Account Owners (the evangelists who created the account for their team). Account owners can see all projects but cannot access projects that did not include them. We realized that this caused problems in the following scenarios:

1. When new projects are created by other people.

2. When people require help with a project. They turn to the account owner for help. Since they are not a part of the project, the project lead or another Super User needs to give the account owner access. Quite cumbersome and a waste of time.

3. If a Super User leaves the team and his/her user login gets disabled. This causes a deadlock situation within a project.

Taking these issues, including an ongoing thread over at our forums here and support emails from users, we decided to make a change to what an Account Owner can access.

Get access to all projects automatically:

From now onwards, the Account Owner can access any project (present as well as future) created in your DeskAway account. For users who donot want to make this happen automatically, we have placed this an an option within the ‘Settings’ section. By default the account owner will not have access to all current and future projects (the way it works right now).

This setting will reset if the account ownership is changed.

Claim access to projects individually:

For those who don’t want to set access for all projects, here is an option to claim a project individually for account owners..

Hope this change eases your workflow and helps you work smoothly…

A couple of small fixes…

Fixed: Blank Milestone Showing Overdue:
Milestones which had no tasks and issues but having deadline (which had passed) were showing under the ‘Overdue’ section. Technically, the Milestone should not show up as Overdue since it does not have any work under it. This confused some of you and hence we applied a simple fix. Now, it will show up under the On going section of the Milestone page.

Fixed: Live LinksLinks under Task List and Task Description
Add any URL while creating a task list or a task and that should be automatically be converted to a link. Clicking on the link will open up the page in a new window.

We are glad to introduce some small features today. We hope these will help your team to simplify work and help you manage your projects better.

Make this page my starting page:

Now you can make any page within DeskAway your starting page. Working a lot on one of your projects? Simply set that page as your starting page so that you are directly taken to the project overview section whenever you log in. Scroll down to the bottom of your DeskAway account (the footer section) to set your starting pages.

Sort Tasks:

Earlier we could only sort tasks manually from the task re-order page. Now you can automatically sort your task by Deadlines or by Priority.

To make it easy to sort through the team members with in a project we have added new filters on the project team page. The default ‘Team’ view within a project only shows active people. Earlier, it listed everyone that were in your DeskAway account.

Add time on task details page:

Previously you could only add time to a task from the Task List page. Now the time spent can be also added from the Task details page. We hope this improves your work-flow without clicking the ‘back’ button everytime you want to add time to a task from the task details page.

Manage this team link:

A tiny enhancement. We have added a new link called “Manage this team” on the Project Overview page below the list of current team members within the project.

Hope you enjoy these features!

Earlier, whenever you completed a task (hit the checkbox) it would disappear from the page since the list of completed tasks was hidden from the user. This made some users and us anxious. Hence, today, we will show you only your last 3 completed and have a link for you to checkout the remaining ones from the Task List page. Here is what it looks like now.

DeskMail is a service by DeskAway that helps you communicate with your projects via email. DeskMail for Issues will allow you and your team to add issues and reply to issue comments via email. If you are using email on your smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry etc.) you can easily email out issues 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 issues (by sending you an email), new comments are added to the issue 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 for Issues?

We observed that email is still very very popular for sending issues and bug reports. People were adding issues 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 issue. 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.

Check out our help page for instructions on using DeskMail for Issues. Thank you for your continued feedback and do keep them coming. Cheers!