What is DeskAway?

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What is DeskAway?

If you are a project manager trying to manage a team and clients that are distributed far and wide, you may be looking for an online solution that will let you both manage your project activities and timescales and provide a means of collaboration for sharing project information and documents.  There are several projects that will fit the bill on the market at the moment, some better than others.  DeskAway, from the Indian company, Synage Software, is one of them.

So What is DeskAway?

Well, before we answer that perhaps you should check out our interview with DeskAway creator, Sahil Parikh.

Not a difficult product to get to grips with quite quickly, DeskAway takes minutes to be up and running with, and there’s no need for technical expertise to install and configure software as it is available on the web as a hosted portal service.  This means that once you are registered, you are ready to go.

As a product, DeskAway has been created to provide a simple interface allowing projects to be managed and simply collaboration amongst project members.  The inclusion of project templates, allows you to set up projects with information already populated, helping save time.  DeskAway features a main dashboard view that gives you a summary of your project status and uses colours to help highlight the status of tasks and milestones as the project progresses.  Functionality allows users to create lists of project tasks, including the scheduling of recurrent tasks, where needed.  Tasks can be assigned to individual team members and tracked to ensure that deadlines are met.

Project information is stored in a single location on the hosting site, which means you don’t need to worry about storage space locally, backups (as these are done by DeskAway), or losing important information. Files can be uploaded and are then available to the project team, removing the need to circulate documents by email and ensuring that everyone has access to the right versions.

The DeskAway permissions functionality allows you to decide which pieces of project information are visible and which are not. The ability to create private tasks gives the project manager the flexibility to restrict access to tasks, without the need to keep such information elsewhere.

DeskAway has only 3 pricing levels.  The lowest is $25 per month and the highest $99 per month.

The difference between the pricing levels centres around the number of users, projects, templates and storage, with the more expensive having more of each!  All other features, such as, reporting, backup of information, security, etc, remain the same across the levels. As a monthly payment plan, you only pay for what you want use – upgrade and downgrade are possible at any time.  Before choosing to buy, you can take advantage of the free 30 day trial and this is available without you having to give your credit card details.  There is a free plan but it’s not readily obvious on the pricing page!  The free plan gives you 1 project, 3 users and limited reporting and branding.  Other features, such as, back up, project templates and time tracking, that are available to the price plans are not available with the free option.