You have asked for it and its finally here! DeskAway account owners will now be able to take a full export and backup of everything within their accounts. This includes all project data (excluding files), shared & public contacts, all blogs (with comments) and  team information.

Even though we backup your data, we thought you might also want a copy of your project stuff from time to time! Its all about giving peace of mind

Read more about export/backup here >

Tasks in Calendar & iCal 

Its finally here! You can now see tasks assigned to you (and have a deadline) on the Calendar page. Clicking on the task name will take you to the task detail page. From here you will be able to add a comment or close the task.
Similarly, the “Subscribe to ical” link will also let you see your tasks in ical supported calendars like Mac iCal, MS Outlook, Mozilla Sunbird etc.

Add Team Member

1. Time Zone Drop-Down: For adding new team members, the timezone dropdown will automatically be populated with the time zone of the Super User currently logged in.
2. Password Field: From now onwards, an automatically generated password will be sent to new team members. Save time entering a password each time you add a new team member.

Task Lists

While adding a Task List, you will also have the option of adding a description. The description will also be included when you export the project progress report to a spreadsheet (from the Reports link).

Contact

You will now be able to enter phone number extensions for all contacts.

Some customers thought that turning off each and every help tip manually was annoying. Hence, we created an easy to way to turn off all help tips at once. Simply, go to any one help tip and click on the “turn off all tips” link.

Email Notifications Checkboxes

Email notifcation checkboxes are by default in “on” (checked) state now. You can find these checkboxes in the Task, Issue & File section.

Templates are re-usable portions of a project that can be used in creating other similar types of projects. 

We will take an example of a Web Design project (a very very simplified version) which have multiple milestones, task lists and tasks. Since this process is followed for all design clients, it would make sense to create a template and then use this template is all our design projects! 

Below are 3 milestones having task lists and tasks for every design project.

• Initial Planning

1. Proposal
   • First Meeting
   • Send Proposal
   • Second Meeting
2. Agreement
   • Send Agreement
   • Sign Agreement
3. Kickoff
   • Get stuff from client

• Design

1. Layout
   • Complete webpage layout
   • Approve from client

• Take Live

1. Hosting
   • Approve hosting provider
   • Upload files and take live
   • Show to client

So, for every new project of this kind, we could load this template and start the project immediately! Save time anyone?

Read the Project Template FAQ’s 

We have released a new feature called the “Personal Email Reminders” to all paid DeskAway accounts. Once you set your email frequency and duration, DeskAway will send you an email once a day with a list of all your overdue and approaching (that have a due date) projects, milestones, tasks and issues. Each user is free to disable the notification if he/she does not wish to receive the email.

Read here to learn more about this feature and enable it in your account >>

Just like Tasks, individual Task Lists within projects can now be re-ordered easily. Follow these simple steps to re-order Task Lists within a project:

1. Goto the Task page by clicking on the Tasks link
2. Provided you have more than 1 Task List, click on the link on the right which says “Re-order Task Lists”. This will take you to a new page.
3. Drag Task Lists to change their ordering.
4. Once done, click on “Save This Task List Order”
5. Go back to the Task page to see your new Task List order

Follow these simple steps to re-order Task within a project:

1. Goto the Task page by clicking on the Tasks link
2. Provided you have more than 1 Task, click on the link on the right which says “Re-order Tasks”. This will take you to a new page.
3. Drag Tasks to change their ordering. If you want to move a task from one Task List to another, you will have to use the ‘move’ functionality (go back to Task Edit mode, click on a task name and then click on ‘Move’).
4. Once done, click on “Save This Task Order”
5. Go back to the Task page to see your new Task order.

Additionally, we have improved the Import Contact functionality. It now uploads a true CSV file (before we had asked you’ll to convert all commas to semi-colons) without errors.