Last year we announced the integration of DeskAway into the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google’s online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. What this meant was that you could easily add your DeskAway account to your Google Apps™ account and access all your project communication without having to sign into DeskAway through a separate browser every time.

In the last few weeks we have gone a step further and integrated Google Docs with your DeskAway account. This means you don’t need to shuffle back and forth between two systems - DeskAway to track project communication and Google Docs to create documents and spreadsheets. With the Google Doc integration you can easily add and update your Google Docs right from your projects!

We think this will help you simplify work and centralize your project work even more.

Check out more information and videos on getting your Google Docs to show up in your projects here.

Hope you like this addition!

The DeskAway Team

PS: For those of you who would like to know more about the Google App integration please see this page.

Sometimes, we work on projects that get paused for various reasons. They are still active but no work is done for some time - whether it is delay on the client’s end, you leave for a vacation, or a change in the scope of the work. We still want these projects to be there but just in a ‘paused’ state. Hence, we came up with the ‘On Hold’ functionality where the project is fully functional but no activity within this project shows up on the Dashboard page, no notifications are sent out, they don’t show up on the daily personal email reminders and due dates from this project are not seen on the Calendar page either.

‘On Hold’ projects can be changed to ‘On Going’ at anytime.

Hope you like this new addition…

This past weekend we released a simple timer feature to track time within your projects automatically. Fire up the timer popup, start it and let it record time as you work on your tasks. Once you are done, stop the timer, add your description and log the time worked. This feature should be great for freelancers and designers working on clients projects. As a bonus, you can also update your status (what are you working on?) from the timer itself!

The Timer can be started in 2 ways - Clicking on the global ‘Start Timer’ link on the secondary navigation (visible from all sections of DeskAway) or clicking on the ‘Start Timer’ button within the timesheet section of any of the projects.

Hope you like it and as always, do send us your feedback!

We have made an update to the way you add time to your Tasks and Issues. Earlier, you had to add the total number of hours worked for a given task/issue each time you worked on that task or issue. So, you would enter 5 hours today and then again update it tomorrow with 7 hours had you worked on a task for an additional 2 hours. Now, all you need to do is to add the incremental time i.e. 2 hours, and the system will keep a track of your total hours i.e 7 hours.

Here is how it works:
If there is a task in which you have already added 5 hours and now you want to add another 2.5 hours then you just need to enter 2.5. DeskAway will calculate the total hours as 7.5 hours (5+2.5= 7.5). There will be 2 entries in the Time Sheet section for this task - one being the original 5 hours and the other being the newly added 2.5 hours.
This works the same for issues as well.

We have updated the time sheet feature with a new user-interface, more filters, option to mark time as billable and smoother addition/editing of time. Here are the new features that we have added:

1. Incremental time feature in task & issue section.
2. Two ways synchronization of time sheet with tasks & issues.
3. Adding and updating time logs are more slick.
4. Now you can mark your time logs as Billable.
5. Filter by dates and users.
6. Fast loading time sheet page.
7. Export the time logs according to the search result.
8. Printer-friendly Time Sheet reports.

Hope you like it! A timer window is coming soon…