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

If you work in the service business it is most likely that your inbox is flooded with ‘to-dos’ from clients. You need to get these emails off your back but you also want them to be delegated well so that you can track progress from anywhere, anytime. We call it ‘feeling free’ and ‘in control’.

Here are couple of ways to simplify your inbox using DeskMail - a feature that lets you email stuff to your DeskAway account so tasks and issues are created automatically.

You can forward client emails from your inbox to your DeskAway account. You can also forward the email to your team member and CC the email to your DeskAway account so that a task is created and assigned to that team member. You need to make sure that the team member is a user within DeskAway and active within that project.

Even better…

Let your clients email tasks to their project within DeskAway (also make sure they are a part of the project within DeskAway). When you login to the system, you will see what needs to be done.

Once you nicely have those tasks off your inbox, you can focus on bigger and better things!

DeskMail is a service by DeskAway that helps you communicate with your projects via email. DeskMail for Issues will allow you and your team to add issues and reply to issue comments via email. If you are using email on your smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry etc.) you can easily email out issues to your team members (just like you would normally) and still have a copy of it stored on your DeskAway account. When people reply to those issues (by sending you an email), new comments are added to the issue on DeskAway and the entire communication thread can be tracked within your projects.

In a nutshell, this is how it works…

What really led us to designing DeskMail for Issues?

We observed that email is still very very popular for sending issues and bug reports. People were adding issues from DeskAway but were using email to comment and update others. Hence, the communication was broken up into 2 channels, DeskAway and email, making it hard for everyone to follow what was happening within a particular issue. If the comment was sent via email, it was not stored on DeskAway and hence making it hard for the project manager to locate it. With the feedback we received, we decided to let people communicate with DeskAway via email aka DeskMail.

Check out our help page for instructions on using DeskMail for Issues. Thank you for your continued feedback and do keep them coming. Cheers!

In this tutorial I will show you how you can use your BlackBerry device to send a task to yourself and have it automatically show up in your BlackBerry Calendar. I will assume that you use Google Apps - especially the Google Calendar.

I assign a lot of to-dos to myself during the day and have recently started using the DeskMail feature. When I send a task out via email (through my BlackBerry), I would also want it to show up in my BlackBerry Calendar so that I can keep a track of it’s due date while I am traveling.

So, here it is. Follow these simple steps and you will soon be able to see your tasks on your BlackBerry Calendar…

Google Apps For Blackberry
Ok, so the first thing you need to do is to setup Google Apps for your BlackBerry. The entire suite of Google Apps for BlackBerry can be downloaded from m.google.com.

Google Sync - Google Calendar to BlackBerry Calendar
Google Apps comes with a Sync tool that will let you sync your BlackBerry Calendar with your Google account. After you run Sync (manually for the first time, and set it to run automatically thereafter) you should see your Google Calendar events on your BlackBerry Calendar.

Subscribe your DeskAway Calendar to your Google Calendar
Next, we want to subscribe to our DeskAway Calendar from Google Calendar. Follow the steps here.
Your DeskAway events should start to show up in your Google Calendar and the next time the Sync happens, they should start showing up on your BlackBerry Calendar as well.

That’s it. You are almost done. Lets test this out. Add a task to yourself with a due date either from your DeskAway account or using the DeskMail feature. Again, make sure you put the due date on the task. Check to see if it shows up on your DeskAway Calendar for that date.

The next time Google Sync runs, you should see this task on your BlackBerry Calendar on the day it was due! The task traveled from your BlackBerry, your DeskAway account, Google Calendar and finally to your BlackBerry Calendar! Even when people in your team assign you tasks, they would now show up on your BlackBerry Calendar. Great way to be on top of your tasks when you are mobile.

Hope this works for you. Feel free to drop me a line if you have suggestions or issues getting this started.

This was one of the most widely requested feature in the last 6 months and we are finally bringing it to you by the name of DeskMail!

DeskMail is a service by DeskAway that helps you communicate with your projects via email. DeskMail will allow you and your team to add tasks and reply to task comments via email. If you are using email on your smartphones (iPhone, Blackberry etc.) you can easily email out tasks to your team members (just like you would normally) and still have a copy of it stored on your DeskAway account. When people reply to those tasks (by sending you an email), new comments are added to the task on DeskAway and the entire communication thread can be tracked within your projects.

In a nutshell, this is how it works…

What really led us to designing DeskMail?

We observed that email is still very very popular for task delegation and project communication (especially on smartphones with email support). People were adding tasks from DeskAway but were using email to comment and update others. Hence, the communication was broken up into 2 channels, DeskAway and email, making it hard for everyone to follow what was happening within a particular task. If the comment was sent via email, it was not stored on DeskAway and hence making it hard for the project manager to locate it. With the feedback we received, we decided to let people communicate with DeskAway via email aka DeskMail.

Why the name DeskMail?

We went through a series of names and even polled our followers on twitter. Keeping in mind future enhancements and features we decided to go with DeskMail - short and sweet, easy to pronounce and like the fact that the ‘away’ in DeskAway gets swapped with ‘mail’ (in this case, sending emails away to DeskAway).

Check out our help page for instructions on using DeskMail. In the coming months, we will be extending DeskMail to Issues and Messages as well. Thank you for your continued feedback and do keep them coming. Cheers!