Imagine you are on a holiday, a much needed getaway from work and suddenly at 11 in the night you get a call from your manager, who is in the other part of the globe. He wants you to upload a business critical file, onto the company intranet for an important client presentation due in the next one hour!

You get to your laptop and try to access your company’s VPN. It is slow to connect and finally turns an “access is denied due to an unscheduled downtime!” There is no way you can upload the file, and you are unable to reach any other employee who may have access to the file.

You are in a remote location, and your vacation is screwed!

Now, imagine the same situation and consider that you were using an online collaboration tool: You save yours and the company’s valuable, billable time by simply accessing the Internet from your hotel. You would log in to the online collaboration Web site, and just send the sought-after file to your manager. Better yet, you ask him to access the section where files are shared on the online collaboration tool and get the file himself.

Wow! It just takes you 15 minutes to go back to your well deserved vacation mode!

Nowadays, online collaboration tools include features such as:

• professional email integration
• document management
• project management
• shared calendaring
• contact management

A highly cost-effective, online collaboration solution is a carefree alternative to the anxieties and costs inherent with supporting complex collaboration software.

During cost-cutting periods, online collaboration tools offer you the following advantages:

• They allow your employees, customers, and partners to share critical business information with one another from anywhere in the world at relatively lower prices.
• Apart from the one-time or annual payment for using the online collaboration tool, the only money you pay is for an Internet connection!
• Small- to medium-sized businesses benefit from hosted collaboration solutions because there’s no software to install and no servers to maintain, ever!
• The often easy-to-use, intuitive, and self-explanatory user interface of most online collaboration tools makes it faster to get acclimatized to. Your employees don’t need training to start using the online tool like you would require before you take a peek at MS SharePoint, MS VSS, and MS Project.

Online collaboration tools offer you big business collaboration at small business price. Mostly, you can access online collaboration tools for a low monthly fee. You just need to simply add new members as and when your business grows. You do not pay salaries for system administrators, maintenance engineers, and network administrators. You do not need an employee to lose his/ her critical productive hours updating/ arranging information in alternative project management software.

The online tools’ service providers provide you with quick setup and deployment models. They require no IT support. It works across any platform - PC or Mac. Plus, the service provider offers free support, training, and upgrades for life! You save more time and money than you can imagine.

Justin & Chaunna Brooke, Owner, Mpyre Marketing
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How are you using DeskAway and what value is it providing your team?
We use DeskAway to organize and assign project tasks to our team in the Philippines. Now everyone always knows exactly what they should be working on in order to keep the business growing.

Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
Before using DeskAway.com it was a nightmare for us to manage everything on paper. We were constantly creating new spreadsheets that just weren’t working.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
It did take a few days to get comfortable with the software. But we persevered through that and now we are like a well oiled machine.

What features does your team use the most?
Being able to upload and download files from a designated area within each project is huge for us. Also it’s very nice to be able to login and immediately see whats been assigned, what of that is completed, and what hasn’t been completed.

Are you emailing (sending tasks, attachments etc.) less because of DeskAway? How has DeskAway helped in lowering project costs, profitability or improving efficiency?
Sometimes 2-3 days can go by and I haven’t talked to a single employee but the work was getting done! We went from being able to get 2 full projects done per day to now getting 4 projects done per day. So DeskAway has doubled our efficiency!

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.?
DeskAway is a must have for any Internet based business and should even be highly considered for offline businesses. When we talk to people about our business the first thing they ask is how we are able to run everything so smoothly - We tell them it’s all about DeskAway!

Thanks for your great software!

See how Sameer & Nandini of Morpheus Venture Partners use DeskAway to manage their portfolio companies.

If you are an avid reader of project management articles, then check out PM Hut - a neatly organized site with articles ranging from Project Collaboration, Delegation to Team Building etc.
Check out their site at PM Hut.

In this article from MyCustomer.com, Bill Gates touches on how software has made people more productive, from email to collaboration & workflow and the future of software as a service.

Read all of Stuart Lauchlan’s article here: The final countdown of Bill Gates