When we started DeskAway we always kept user permissions in mind - the stuff about ‘can my team member see other people’s projects’ or ‘can a task, file or doc shared with one person be seen by my client’ ? It is the way we liked to work and thought others would appreciate it too.  You obviously don’t want to share everything with everybody.

The question of ‘can my clients see tasks assigned to ABC’ pops up pretty frequently in our support tickets and so we thought of getting a simple video out to show that tasks within DeskAway are permission-driven. You can rope in your clients (you should add them as Limited Users) to collaborate on your projects but have them only see things that you want them to see. Here is a quick video of how this is possible:

Frozen projects in DeskAway are projects that lack a project lead or a Super user - maybe these guys left the team or company. So, someone needs to get a hold of this project and get it going. Who better than the account owner himself. Here are 2 ways for account owners to get back control of frozen projects (these are shown in black on the project listing page).

1. Click on the ‘Claim this project’ link just below to the project name on the project listing page.

2. If the Account Owner wants to get an access of all the projects which are not assigned to him then the account owner can claim these projects all at once from the settings page.

You can even check out the ‘1 Minute Video Tip - Getting access to all the frozen projects from the settings tab‘ that we blogged a few weeks back.

Hope this helps you take control of frozen projects!

Who doesn’t want to be an office hero. It’s is your turn now by checking out the 5 absolutely smart things you can do with DeskAway while managing any project:

Track Problems

Every project (heck, everything in life) has problems and if you don’t track them they are only going to get bigger and bigger.

DeskAway Feature: Issues
Plan: Personal & Above

Re-use Projects

Why duplicate work when you can automate easily? Projects that repeat themselves can be easily cloned and re-used. Think ‘web design’, ’seo’, ’social media’ or internal projects like ‘HR’, ‘General administration’ or ‘Event Management.’

DeskAway Feature: Project Templates
Plan: Personal & Above

Whoever said that the best of both worlds cannot be possible? For those who love being in their inbox, why not also delegate work to your colleagues (via email) and still have the stuff tracked within DeskAway?

DeskAway Feature: DeskMail
Plan: Professional & Above

Set Personal reminders

Get a daily reminder about what is overdue and upcoming within your work. This will keep you focused and on your toes. If you don’t want it, atleast turn it on for your colleagues

DeskAway Feature: Email Reminders
Plan: Personal & Above

You have signed up for a free or a trial plan and now you might be wondering how to get your team on-board, especially those non-web, non-technical folks who might be a tad bit slower thank you. Not to worry! We strive to keep the tool simple (yet powerful) and would like to share 7 tips on getting started…

Help Center: The help page is comprehensive and well-documented with the most common and important FAQs. If you find yourself stuck, this is the best place to go to first.

Videos/ Tutorials: You will find a video tutorial for every DeskAway feature. In addition, our support team posts a ‘1 Minute Video Tip’ series every week that will help you learn about the finer details of DeskAway.

Blog: Subscribe to our blog and not only will you learn tips/tricks about DeskAway but also how we function as a company, make decisions, have fun and build DeskAway.

Getting Started Video: A must watch is the “Getting Started Video” that also shows up on your Dashboard when you log in. Here, you will learn how to add a new project, team members and get started working within that project.

Personal Help: We have questions when we sign up on other services and sometimes don’t feel like mowing through the help sections. You might too. If that is the case, you can easily email us at support AT deskaway.com and someone from our team will be there to help you out.

GetSatisfaction Community: At this community, you can ask a question, report a problem, share an idea, or join in conversations already in progress. Here, you will find other users that share similar feature requests or issues. Our team is also active on this community.

Play Around: The ultimate way to learn a new tool is to just play around with it. Make mistakes, add stuff and then delete the same stuff. Add a couple of people from your team and pretend you are assigning them milestones or tasks. Just like you would take a car for a test drive and try out all of it’s features, do the same with your brand new DeskAway account. There is no better way to learn while exploring.

Happy DeskAway’ing…

Email is the most successful and popular application ever. We all rely on getting our information, updates and notifications through email whether it is on our PC, Mac, Blackberry or iPhone. We understand that email is not going anywhere and so have built certain tools within DeskAway that will help you collaborate right from your inbox.

1. Every action in DeskAway has an email notification - so if I am assigning you a task or an issue, you will get an email with all the information and a link to view it within the application.

2. Then there is DeskMail - with this, people can simply reply to the emails they get in #1 (so they are working in their inbox now) but a copy of their email reply is also stored within their DeskAway project. So, if you reply to Jay’s email with comments, not only Jay will receive your comment via email but our application will start appending this email conversation as a comment thread within the task that can be visited later. Sending attachments is also possible. Think Posterous or tumblr here.

3. If you set it on, you and your team members can also get a daily email reminder (so, you don’t have to log in to the application) of all your pending and upcoming projects, milestones, tasks and issues.

There are a few companies that have moved away from email for collaboration, but if you love your inbox you can take advantage of the above when working on your projects.