Quickies: are personal notes that can be added, edited and deleted in a jiffy! Only you can see your notes.
You can use quickies to make quick reference notes, note down ideas, followups, notes while on a call - which can be translated to tasks, etc later. Quickies is like your personal notepad where you can pen down thoughts, things of reference for yourself!
You can edit these personal notes to update / modify them OR delete them.
My blackberry went off again non-stop with people signing up at 6:30am IST. I thought maybe Techcrunch wrote about us! Nope, thats never happened and I don’t know why (maybe they are too US-centric). My RSS feed picked it up and amazingly, Web Worker Daily, a really well-written blog of web apps, productivity news and stuff for the “web worker” reviewed DeskAway once again - DeskAway Embraces the Social Turn, Adds More Personalization Options. The stuff that we churned out last week was now there for everyone to see and try out. Very cool. The first time they reviewed us in May 2008 was here.
Thank you Darell Etherington & Web Worker Daily! Hope your readers find the new DeskAway social features useful. There is lots more to come in the next few months.
The Guide to Home Based Business Blog lists DeskAway as one of the 6 twitter users that are listening to their customers and growing their business through Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length (Wikipedia).
They mentioned “@deskaway uses Twitter to “send out product announcements, coupon codes, help trial users, share articles on productivity etc.”
Our twitter homepage is twitter.com/deskaway. Besides the above, we also just hang out and talk about web stuff and internet marketing on Twitter. Do get an account and see how Twitter can be one more way for your business to interact with its customer.
If you want to read more about twitter, here are some helpful articles:
I’ve been working with a few companies in the MVP portfolio on their Product Alpha Releases. The past month specially, has been busy with testing the functionality, usability, and other related aspects. Managing multiple projects, test cases, filing bugs and usability issues, and tracking to them to ensure they are fixed is one hell lot of a task, especially when teams work remotely.
I started my collaboration on email initially, moved on to google spreadsheets, but soon felt things were all over the place. Then I decided to file issues and bugs on a spreadsheet and upload them on DA. Until one fine day, I discovered that DA actually has an Issues section where I could have filed and tracked the bugs and issues from the start!
DA defines Issues as something that needs to be resolved during a project.
Once I chanced upon the Issues Feature, I figured out that I can now file all my observations related to that particular project right on that DA account. This was not just true to me, but the companies could use this method with their entire test team. Here is what we went about doing:
1. Uploaded the test cases document on DA Docs: This helped testers refer to what to test and what the expected behavior was.
2. Gave access to all members of the Test Team on the companies DA account. These guys who were testing were friends and family besides remote tech. testers.
3. All people who were testing used the Issues Feature to note their observations by adding a new issue. You can add:
a. Summary
b. Description
c. Link the Issue to a Milestone
d. Priority
e. Due Date
f. Assign Issue to a particular person
g. Specify who all can see that particular Issue
4. Once the Issues were filed all associated users tracked the status of the issues, found out if the assigned person had accepted and started work on the issues, and users interacted using the comments option for each issue.
5. Teams also exported the issues to an excel sheet OR printed the issues table to pass them onto users who were not on DeskAway.
This not just made tracking Issues easy, we also saw that things were more organized and we got issues resolved faster.
Currently, what’s missing is that we can’t attach images / files to an issue, add categories to issues or tag them. I spoke to the DA team about these things and they have promised me that they are adding these functionalities very soon. They are also soon going have this cool feature, where I can add Issues, attach files to issues and do everything else via email.
Guess this is what Simplfy Team Work really means! Or is that my Xmas wish coming true?
