Deskaway is Web-based Project Management Software. We talked to Sahil from Deskaway.com about how this system supports our 7 Goals for using PM software.

1. Improve project reporting and tracking

DeskAway's reporting functionalities gives you a printer-friendly scorecard-like project progress report for each and every project that you are a part of. If thats not enough, there are also visually appealing reports that you can view under each project - Gantt Chart-esque milestone timeline, task breakdown pie charts and resource usage reports.

2. Improve estimating and scheduling

Every project in DeskAway has a reporting feature. This gives the people in the project the ability to compare past projects with new ones and see how the later fared. Scheduling resources becomes easy with project and milestone timeline charts (something like gantt charts) where it is real easy to see all your project and milestone timelines on one page. Easy to print out and share with your team.

3. Reduce cost or speed process up by automating workflows

Within DeskAway, one creates a project, assigns people to that project and then creates milestones and tasks to plan the project. With everyone's accountabilities listed on the page, project information in a central location and all correspondance shared by everyone, DeskAway helps simplify working in a team and reducing the time it takes to get a project completed.

4. Improve resource assignments

Within DeskAway, its really easy to delegate a task  to someone in your team. Coupled with task reminders and reporting, you get an accurate view of who's doing what and how many outstanding tasks they have at hand. Instead of emailing tasks, using this kind of a system-driven approach not only saves you time but keeps everyone in the loop and accountable.

5. Improve project communication

As its rightly mentioned, projects are about people. There is so much to say in a project. New people join the team and old ones leave. A lot of times, timelines and requirements also change. DeskAway is built so that all this communication and more is easily captured within your projects. Instead of emailing a file to 5 people and then getting feedback from them (thats another 5 emails!), wouldn't it be easy to just share the file with the people involved and then gather comments and feedback on that same page? With an in-built project message board, and streamlined commenting on tasks, files and docs, communication remains in place, and is quick and efficient. With the Search functionality, it is easy to pull up old information within seconds.

6. Improve project team collaboration

Being a web-based service anyone from anywhere in the world can login to your DeskAway account (provided you have given them permission) and  get project work done! With DeskAway's email notifications, every change in the project gets logged as a new email notification thats sent right to your inbox. Having a good permission-based infrastructure, it is possible to control the access to information by collaborating teams.

7. Improve overall project process

With a simple to use interface and nothing to download or install, user-adoption is much quicker when using DeskAway. Hence, when everyone is collaborating and working off the same system, project management becomes a whole lot simpler!