Last year we announced the integration of DeskAway into the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google’s online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. What this meant was that you could easily add your DeskAway account to your Google Apps™ account and access all your project communication without having to sign into DeskAway through a separate browser every time.

In the last few weeks we have gone a step further and integrated Google Docs with your DeskAway account. This means you don’t need to shuffle back and forth between two systems - DeskAway to track project communication and Google Docs to create documents and spreadsheets. With the Google Doc integration you can easily add and update your Google Docs right from your projects!

We think this will help you simplify work and centralize your project work even more.

Check out more information and videos on getting your Google Docs to show up in your projects here.

Hope you like this addition!

The DeskAway Team

PS: For those of you who would like to know more about the Google App integration please see this page.

A few small fixes…

Fixed: Monthly recurring tasks date issue
Tasks were not recurring on the set monthly deadline. This is because we were calculating months as a fixed 30 days so this issue came up when months had fewer than 30 days (Feb) or had 31 days. Now, if a monthly recurring task has a  deadline of 31st October then the new recurring task will be 31st December and not November - this works the same way as Google Calendar monthly recurring events.

Fixed: Upload Files in the Issue section
Files are properly uploading to the issues section of each project. Earlier, there were issues with certain file types and names.

Fixed: Wrong deadline for GMT -5
For this timezone the deadline would come back 1 day earlier.  This has been resolved and tested with other time zones as well.

Fixed: Adding time to Tasks
The time clock icon would not show up when time was added to a task unless a page refresh was forced.

Fixed: Google Apps login help
We have added some more help and informative error messages on the login window for the Google Apps login.

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 so, then why not take advantage of the new integration between these two apps. It will save you time of logging into 2 different apps everyday. After integration, sign in to your Google Apps account and then choose ‘DeskAway’ from the list of services. This will take you directly into your DeskAway account without ever logging in again.

Check out the video below. The integration takes only a couple of minutes. This will simplify the way you work!

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.