I went around asking a few of the startups I work with about DeskAway & how they use it. I was mainly interested in finding out:

•    What are the features that they use most on DeskAway
•    How do they motivate their teams in using DeskAway regularly
•    What is it about DeskAway that they like the most

I spoke with three startup guys who manage their teams and partners on DeskAway. Sameer Guglani, Founding Partner, MVP: A typical early-adopter and influencer, motivates teams he works with to use new tools, and is quick with his feedback. Rizwan Iqbal, co-founder, Sutra Services Pvt. Ltd: A tech geek, who is a part of a company who evaluates various tools before closing on one and ensures that the team uses them. Pankaj, an entrepreneur who is working on a startup in the space of customer experience and feedback (in stealth mode): He is someone who uses tools and mechanisms only when he sees a direct value to his business.

Here is what I found, some of which can be tips to Owners / Team Leads on DeskAway.

Most Used Features on DeskAway:

Tasks and Task Lists. At its basic level managing a project is all about organizing one’s tasks and task lists. All of them found DeskAway’s interface to managing, assigning and handling tasks to be very easy. Some of these users and their teams use task list for managing not only things related to specific projects, but also have their own personal task lists and optimize their time by managing all that they do on DeskAway.

Getting your team to use DeskAway regularly:

All the users I spoke to were using DeskAway quite regularly to manage their work and interact with their teams. A few techniques they have employed and have worked for them are:

•    Getting all work related communication onto DeskAway. Using the tasks, milestones, notifications, notes and file-sharing on DeskAway only and keeping away from emails & phone. This works well, shares one of the users, especially when dealing with remote teammates, as this is the most efficient way of collaborating.
•    “If I see them (a task) on DeskAway, they aren’t done yet” is what one of the users shared. Their technique is that any task assigned to them has to be dealt with on DeskAway, this ensures that all of them check back on things assigned to them on DeskAway and act on it there.
•    Making it a part of the process, building usage of DeskAway as part of the various things teams do. Identifying the advantages of getting onto DeskAway and educating the teams about it.

Though, all of them do think that once the teammates see the advantages of getting on to DeskAway, there has been no looking back.

The best thing about DeskAway:

•    The UI is very simple and easy to understand
•    The navigation flow is very good, it does not need an extra effort to learn things
•    DeskAway team keep adding to the already extensive feature set, which makes it all the more interesting to use the tool. To quote a user, “ It’s like you think of something (feature) and a few weeks later, its already there on DeskAway”

All these teams believe that DeskAway has made managing their teams and projects easy and more efficient. One of the teams owes it to DeskAway, as it became easy for them to get into a structure through DeskAway, which was missing earlier.

While I use DeskAway to manage my work-related projects, I also use Outlook to manage my Mails and Outlook Calendar to keep track of my other appointments that fall outside of the work I manage on DeskAway.

DeskAway also has a very helpful Calendar, which helps me track my deadlines, milestones, events and important dates related to my projects.

As I used both DeskAway Calendar and Outlook Calendar, there was one problem that I faced sometime back. If I forgot to lookup the Calendar on my DeskAway account, I found myself slipping on an important event or a deadline. I figured out the reason for this was that I was used to the “Reminder Pop-ups” that my Outlook had, which was not there on my DeskAway.

This is when I found out about Subscribe to iCalendar feature available on DeskAway. This allows me to sync my Deskaway Calendar with my Outlook Calendar in just one click. Now that I have subscribed to iCalendar, I can view my DeskAway Calendar on my Outlook. I can now get reminders of my DA tasks too from my Outlook.

However, the DeskAway calendar on Outlook is ‘view only’. If I have to make modification, I will have to do it on my DeskAway calendar. Any changes made on my DeskAway calendar will automatically sync with Outlook.

DeskAway also gives you an option to manually sync the DeskAway calendar with any program that supports .ics format.

Now, after syncing my DeskAway calendar with my Outlook, I am totally in control of various deadlines and events that I manage on DeskAway. As a user, one thing I like a lot about business offerings is their ability to morph themselves into places I frequent, into applications I use extensively. This increases my adaptability and usage of that product or service.

When you work on Projects, more often there is a need to send out common messages to all those involved in that particular project. These messages could be general guidelines, motivational messages, specific information related to design or development or team party invites

Did you know that on DeskAway, it’s possible to send out common messages to people involved in specific Projects?

Here’s where you can find Messages:

You can Add Categories and tag each message to a category, making it easy to organize. You can even choose to send the message out to only a few people in the team.Teammates can respond to the message by adding their comments to it. Thus keeping all related thoughts to that topic under one message thread.

For a long time in my life I have struggled to maintain all my contacts in one place, from where I could access them at any time, from any where. Usually, I export the contacts from outlook onto a .csv file or would export all contacts with my mails as a .pst with a plan to maintain all of them in one spreadsheet. But unfortunately, nothing ever happened. The result - I found myself toying with 4 different files fishing out relevant contact details, as and when, if at all.

I started using DeskAway in the second half of 2008 and found that they have an answer to my problem - a “Contacts” section where:

1.  I can Import my contacts from my mail client or anywhere outside either as a .csv file or a .txt file
2.  I can Add a Contact directly to DeskAway
3.  I can Export all contacts onto a .csv file which I can keep as a backup on my machine and export it onto my mail client

Ever since, I’ve been trying to get all my scattered contacts onto DeskAway and manage it in a better fashion, but in vain. So, recently I told myself that I have to get this over and done with before 2008 ended! So, one of those days in December I got all the files I maintained my contacts in together and:

1. Exported the contacts as .csv files having the following column heads:

[First Name], [Last Name], [Email], [Designation], [Mobile], [Office], [Extension], [HomeNo], [Fax], [Address]

2. Imported the contacts .csv file onto DeskAway:

Under the Contacts Tab, there is Import Contacts option. You can upolad the .csv files from here on to DeskAway. Once you upload a file, all contacts will be labeled as Personal Contacts.

Upload contacts onto DeskAway by importing a .csv or .txt file

3. Organized my contacts: I accessed the contacts I had uploaded through the View Contacts option and edited the contacts by adding labels to each of them. Adding Labels is really helpful in organizing contacts. Say, you were at the MacWorld expo in San Francisco this year and you would have met quite a few interesting people, potential partners, etc there. You can create a label named “MacWorld Expo 2009″ and have all those contacts under this label, making it easy for you to access them later.

Edit individual contacts from the Personal Contacts view

Edit Contact and add relevant Labels, Add Company Name, etc.

4. Assigned Permissions: I “Shared” a few contacts with everyone in my team, so that they could benefit out of that contact. For a few contacts, where I wanted my team to know I know that particular person, but did not want to share the contact, I checked the Lock Sensitive Data option. This lets others know of the contact name, but hides other critical details. I also used the other permission based sharing options that DeskAway has, which I personally think is a great time saving tool and very well thought of.

Assign Permissions and lock sensitive data while sharing contacts

I am now glad that I actually got to organize all my contacts on DeskAway. My team accesses the contacts they want out of my list and I don’t have to look through four different files. Most of all, earlier I only looked back at contacts of people who I may have met in the recent past - as it was memory dependent. But now, all it takes is a lookup related to the relevant Tags, company name or first name / last name and I can sift through all the contacts I have at once. A great tool that compliments the efforts of networking and helps put it to use!

An entrepreneur who has just got on to DeskAway pinged me the other day and asked me a rather rudimentary question “How do I add people into my Project?”  So here is how:

If you are the Account Owner or Super User, you can ADD / MODIFY / DELETE teammates from the TEAM tab on DA.

Here is where you’ll find the Team option

Under the TEAM tab, there is an option to Add Team Member. Here you can add a new team members to your account.While adding a team member, you can define the User Type for each member. User Type defines the extent of permissions / rights / access that user will have in the DA account. There are 3 user types:

Limited User: You can add people you are collaborating with, who are from outside your company as Limited Users. Limited Users can also be those who are working on specific parts of a particular project. Say, a team member of a UI design team or the free lance designer.

Regular User: Team leads, people who have a coordination role to play in a particular project, those who need to manage a small team or a particular project - all these guys can get Regular User access. Like the Team Lead of a UI design team. He can not only monitor the UI team, but can also add tasks / assign tasks, create events, share his thoughts on the project via the blog to motivate the team, etc.

Super User: A Super User can do all the things the other two users can do and more. This user can create and manage projects by adding milestones, tasks, etc.; assign people to the projects, manage and monitor the team mate’s progress within the project. An Account Owner / another Super User can give this user permission to add other users to the account and modify the account settings on DeskAway. However, these two permissions should be given to team members who are high up in the responsibility chart of the organization. Managers and CXOs in an organization are ideal people to be assigned permissions of Super Users. Team mates who are owners of a particular project, who are required to analyze data and progress of a set of projects, etc.

At MVP, the partners have Super User access. Each company we work with has a Project in their name and only team mates of that particular company has access to their project on MVP, as Regular Users. Anyone outside of that company, who is a part timer, free lancer, consultant - all these guys are Limited Users.  I have added all the various entrepreneurs I work with as team mates to my MVP account, globally. This makes it easy for me to add specific users to specific projects.

Adding users to specific projects:

Within a project, there is another Team option; from here you can manage team member access to that particular project. Here all the members that are a part of the account are listed and you can give them permission to access that particular project by changing the permission button from Red to Green. Only an Account Owner or a Super User with permission can add users to specific projects.

As an Account Owner on DeskAway, assigning permissions to users is a great responsibility.  Think about the level of involvement of the person you are adding into the account and assign them permissions accordingly.