In this issue

Welcome!
New Features - Archive Your Completed Projects!
Upcoming Enhancements
Largest Card Manufacturer Uses DeskAway to Streamline Front-Office
Working in Teams - Best Practice #2
Resources
Contribution
Closing

Hello there!

Welcome to the third issue of this newsletter and hope everyone had a great weekend! Thank you all for sending us kilobytes of requests for new features and enhancements. We can assure you that we are doing our best to get those to you soon, if not sooner. For all those of you who requested the project 'archiving' features, its live now. Check out the New Features section below for more information.

I would like to thank Robert, Sam, Umesh, Laurel and the many others who offered to join our Beta Program. You will hear from us soon. If anyone else wants to try out features before it goes live, do send us an email at support@deskaway.com with the subject being "Sign me up in your Beta Program".

As always, thanks for your support and good luck with organizing, managing and tracking your projects with DeskAway!

Best,
Sahil Parikh
Founder, DeskAway.com

Do you have projects that are completed but are holding count on your paid plan limit? Now, simply edit your completed project and archive it - its as good as locking it (or making it read-only). You will not be able to add/edit/delete anything from the Archive Projects project and it will not count towards your 'active' projects in your paid plan. Archived projects can be un-archived at anytime by editing the project (at which stage they will again begin to count in your plan limit). Additionally, none of the stuff (overdue tasks, issues etc.) will show up on the main dashboard for an archived project.

Why is this useful?

1. Cost-effective - you do not pay for archived projects. Only pay for ongoing projects.

2. Better Organizing - Easily distinguish between ongoing, completed and archived projects.

3. Knowledge Repository - Since you can have unlimited archived projects, it serves as a knowledge repository of all your old projects that can be searched.

We are adding a couple of cool enhancements by the end of first week in April 2008:

1. Linking up your time logs to Milestones
2. Tweaking the Dashboard user-interface so that it takes up less space
3. Sort projects that are 'on going'
4. A few other small enhancements and fixes.

"We were impressed with the user-friendliness of the Dashboard (and general interface) and relieved that we could finally organize our relatively newer projects and business models."
Aditi Sheth-Kejriwal,
CTO,
Parksons Games & Sports

With Aditi's initiative, DeskAway became the central project management system for their front-office. This was a unique case-study for us, since they are a manufacturing company - in fact, one of India's largest manufacturers of playing cards.

Aditi's team had no central project management system before they began using DeskAway. The Accounts dept. used their own system (they still do) and everyone else worked on their own, only coordinating through e-mails or meetings.

The transition to DeskAway was easier for staff that worked directly under them - where they were able to give their employees time and willingness to set standards for management; and the more attuned to the PC, the quicker was the transition to DeskAway. Currently, they have about 24 people (including remote designers) using DeskAway and managing 9 projects.

Aditi thinks that the Contact aggregation with calendar, the "share-ability" of files (and its versions) and not surprisingly, organizing projects have been the most useful features. She has found a marked decrease in the amount of time her team spends emailing and sending out masses of tasks and attachments. Of course, it helps that they have made it office policy for the people using DeskAway to have it open all day along with their Outlook Express. This way, it causes them to check on it from time to time.

Parksons Games and Sports have been one of the oldest clients of DeskAway - they started when DeskAway was in its beta stage - and they continue to stay loyal to the software that keeps their team organized, efficient and on the same page!

A clear mind brings clarity to the project/activity. This again applies to our everyday living. If we are clear about what we want to do (and what we don't want to do) it becomes extremely easy to focus and get the most out of the present. Can you imagine what wonders can happen if this clarity is passed on to everyone working on a collective activity or project?

Are you a current DeskAway user and want to share your experience? We'd love to feature your story!

Click here to submit your story
(Provide us with your name, email address and a company logo)

Thank you for being a part of the DeskAway community! Please feel free to forward this newsletter to people you think might benefit from it.