We love Twitter. Besides sharing updates regarding our company, product, brand, it also gives us the ability to reach out to people that are actively looking for project management tools. So, we went to Twitter Search, searched for ‘project management tools’, grabbed the resulting RSS feed and set it up in Google Reader. We noticed that at the end of the day there would be a few hundred tweets mentioning “project management tools” and most of them were duplicates, spammy and through ad networks - stuff that people paid other people to tweet. It wasn’t fun to sift through all of this each day.

Is there a way to simplify this?

Enter Twitter advanced search.

Through the advanced search we were able to refine our search terms and exclude certain words that were increasing the number of tweets in the RSS results. Here is the new query that we added to the RSS reader. The corresponding results would have the words “project management tool” but should not have the words “ad”, “#spon” and “#paid”.

project management tool  -ad -#spon -#paid

Beautiful! Today, our results are much more refined and easy to parse through. It’s even fun going through this list and getting in touch with people who might love our app.

Our assumption that we know what everyone’s upto is absolutely wrong. That’s why DeskAway has its own simple micro- blogging feature which allows all the members to post and update their status. Through these statuses, we can learn what others are doing, share links and project updates. Further we can also subscribe to RSS feeds of these updates.

Blog RSS

Subscribe to your DeskAway blog using the RSS links on the left panel. You can keep track of what people are sharing with you without logging into your DeskAway account.

Search

DeskAway Search gives you the ability to search through all your project stuff using the “All” option. Besides, we have also added search through Milestones as well as Task Lists. Check it out and see how easy it is to find that file or doc! We have also made some minor enhancements to the interface e.g. you can edit a doc directly from the search results page

“Collaboration at the heart of project management” - PM 2.0 Definition: Wikipedia

Projects are no longer created, managed, tracked and controlled by project managers. Thats the thing of the past. Today, everyday work that has a business outcome is treated like a ‘project’. e.g. launching your website, releasing a new version of a software, gathering input from your clients etc. Business people (even business owners) that have a stake in the project are the new ‘project managers’. The control has shifted from top-down to bottom-up. At the heart of this shift is the need to collaborate effectively, easily and quickly. 

Going back in time, project management 1.0 was all about planning, getting schedules right and setting up the project with nice looking charts and graphs. Today, with dispersed teams, always-online gadgets and sophisticated online technology, Project Management 2.0 is about people, conversations, relationships, sharing, execution and collaboration. Less planning and getting more work done.

Project management 2.0 gives you complete visiblity to whats going on within your projects. Real-time changes and updates to your projects can be easily tracked online. This helps your team to take action early or change course quickly if things are not going right. 

At DeskAway, we are striving to create an online service that is not only simple and powerful to use but also facilitates social collaboration. DeskAway already includes comment threads, RSS and instant email notifications. In the coming months we plan to integrate user profiles, twitter-like social message updates, email integration so that your conversation via email can be logged easily into DeskAway. 

At the end of the day software should be fun and easy to use. Just like your social network, right?

1. My Tasks - Right from your Dashboard you can now see and close all tasks that you are responsible for. Plus, you can also see tasks that you have delegated out. We thought we’d make this more user-friendly and simple. Impress your team. Meet your deadlines more efficiently!

2. Project History - Get real-time updates on all your project from the last 30 days. Every team member in your project can now keep up with whats happening within the project. Project History is permission-based. You (or anyone else) will not see stuff that is not shared or accessible by you.

3. RSS - Subscribe to your Project History using RSS. Your feed will be automatically updated when there is activity in your project.

4. Task Completed Date - Easily see when a particular task was completed.