The world is moving towards virtual, remote, dispersed teams. I know many of DeskAway users work with remote freelancers, partners and employees. This article busting common myths on remote working might be helpful to all of you’ll (written by Avdi Grimm of wideTeams).

Working in a dispersed team has its share of challenges, but some of the fears that people have about remote work simply aren’t born out by the experience of real-world teams. Here are a few if the more common misconceptions I’ve encountered.

Working outside the office is distracting. This is one of the most persistent myths I’ve run into. Sure, working from home can be distracting. But out of the remote workers I’ve talked to, the majority find their home office a better environment for focused work than a traditional office.Which shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, if you work with people you like, it means that your workplace is going to be filled with people you have a lot in common with, having conversations about things that are interesting to you! While I’m not proud of it, I’ve had hallway conversations that lasted for hours at some jobs.Not to mention that when people can see you, they are more likely to interrupt you to ask you a question or get a status update. Proximity invites disruption.

Read the other 4…

Sahil Parikh’s interview is live on Zach Katkin’s Promana.net - a resource for project management related tips and software. Sahil talks about how he got started with DeskAway, what does he think about his competitors, surprising things running a web software company and future plans.

You can catch the entire interview here.

Mobicules is an agile web and mobile app development company, working with new technology ventures and some of the biggest brands around, helping them build sophisticated world class products while meeting aggressive go-to-market times required for web and mobile products today. We are a 40 people team and work with some very demanding clients spread all over the world. We have been at the forefront of the technologies we work on, and are very quick to adopt and adapt to technical and methodology changes.

Mobicules was founded by Munish Bansal and Niraj Ranjan Rout, who have a combined experience of more than 15 years in diverse technical areas such as the internet, VLSI design, EDA and mobile technologies.

“Everything in DeskAway works really well for us.”

Munish Bansal and Niraj Ranjan Rout, Mobicules Founder

This is how they use DeskAway,

How are you using DeskAway when growing your business?
In the last six months, we have moved the project management for all the projects running at Mobicules to DeskAway. DeskAway has helped us in communicating with our clients better, in keeping information documented, and in helping large teams collaborate better to achieve project targets.

Were you using any other tool before DeskAway?
We were using a combination of Redmine, Google Sites and BaseCamp before we switched to DeskAway.

Was there a learning curve associated with DeskAway? How did your team adapt to a new application?
It hardly took any time. Not just our team, our clients too switched from whatever we were using to DeskAway in time. The learning videos interspersed throughout the site greatly accelerated the learning process on DeskAway. Messages, Tasks, Files and Issues work in a very intuitive manner. The interface is really zippy, and we feel very comfortable working on DeskAway.

What features does your team use/like the most?
We use Messages, Tasks and Files very heavily. Being able to add comments to just about everything really helps.

Are there any other thoughts that you would want to share with us regarding our service, product etc.?
As for now, everything in DeskAway works really well for us. As a services company, we’d love to see features like time-logging by developers and automated timesheet creation for projects or developers. We find the pricing to be very good. We haven’t had a reason to contact the support team till now, but we have no reason to believe that the support would not be stellar.

Thanks!

If you are using DeskAway and would like to get featured, please drop us a note and we will get in touch with you.

Sahil Parikh wrote a guest post for GQ India on managing email and using the new Google Priority Inbox…

We were nearing the finishing line and we could taste success. The champagne was in the fridge. Then a few days later it hit us. We’d lost out on the client because of an email that we missed about deadlines. One measly message meant we missed out on a project that could have thrown us into the big league.

So it’s unsurprising that until last week, I would go through all my emails in the constant fear that I would miss something critical amid the mountain of spam. With the advent of smart phones, emails that were once considered work are now mixed with articles stored for reference, grocery lists, new conference notices and desperate salesmen promising first place in search listings.

Read the entire article on the GQ India.

We started using Zendesk early 2009. Before that we were managing support tickets the old and boring way - using a shared email inbox. Eeek!

Today, Zendesk has completely automated and centralized our support system. Every email to support AT deskaway.com gets logged in as a new ticket that can be picked up by anyone in our team. I think we save 1-2 hours each day, feel good that all support knowledge is stored in a central location accessible from anywhere. Here are the few things we really love about Zendesk:

Extremely easy to use and powerful.
Active rollout of features and new enhancements.
We can set macros, triggers - in other words, save and re-use answers for commonly asked questions.
Super active support and twitter team.
iPhone app for on-the-go support.
We share half the name :-).

If you are looking to automate and centralize your customer service then we recommend you give Zendesk a test drive.