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:

Some of you found the permission structure of DeskAway a bit rigid for Account Owners (the evangelists who created the account for their team). Account owners can see all projects but cannot access projects that did not include them. We realized that this caused problems in the following scenarios:

1. When new projects are created by other people.

2. When people require help with a project. They turn to the account owner for help. Since they are not a part of the project, the project lead or another Super User needs to give the account owner access. Quite cumbersome and a waste of time.

3. If a Super User leaves the team and his/her user login gets disabled. This causes a deadlock situation within a project.

Taking these issues, including an ongoing thread over at our forums here and support emails from users, we decided to make a change to what an Account Owner can access.

Get access to all projects automatically:

From now onwards, the Account Owner can access any project (present as well as future) created in your DeskAway account. For users who donot want to make this happen automatically, we have placed this an an option within the ‘Settings’ section. By default the account owner will not have access to all current and future projects (the way it works right now).

This setting will reset if the account ownership is changed.

Claim access to projects individually:

For those who don’t want to set access for all projects, here is an option to claim a project individually for account owners..

Hope this change eases your workflow and helps you work smoothly…