DeskAway
Friday, May 30th, 2008DeskAway is very well done. It is probably the best I’ve seen so far for my requirements. The drawback is that it is only available as a hosted solution and I’m worried about data security.
The design is clean, well laid out and results in a highly intuitive system. Help notes and videos are available in each section should you get stuck. Features offered by project are: milestones, tasks, issues, timesheet, document management, collaborative documents, team directory, forum and reports.
Milestones, tasks and issues all work well. The document management section allows for the creation of one level of folders, versioning, meta data (description) and comments. Simple but well done. The forum feature however is a little over simplistic, with no text editors and no possibility for attachments. The blog is in the main section and is independant of projects - a great pity as it works well. Most project features give you the possibility to alert team members via email when something changes.
As well as a blog the main section also contains global and personal contact lists, team members for all projects, site search and a personal calender.
I’m very tempted by this system but worried about security and longevity. I’d also like to tweak a few things, which obviously can’t be done with a hosted, standard solution.
