LAMPDocs

DeskAway

DeskAway is an online project collaboration service that provides teams a central location to easily organize, manage and track their projects. It has really great functionality and very intuitive interface, ensuring thus a simpler and a more powerful way to collaborate and work smarter. In addition to that there are some really nice features which you can hardly encounter in any other online service of this kind, but we will talk about that a little bit later (check pros and cons).

Here is the first screenshot – Project Overview page:

Given page contains just the information you need (project description, latest activity, overdue tasks, milestones and issues) – nothing extra, but it’s more than enough for a project overview.

Another important page that is checked very often as well – Tasks Page:

Here you can do everything you need: expand and collapse tasks to check the description, reorder, add comments, edit, delete, check the priority, reassign and etc.). All tasks are grouped in task lists. To my mind there is nothing to add to this page – it’s really well organized.

Messages Page is also of great importance:

This page is as simple as possible – you can just create topics and add messages to it.

Main characteristic features:

• Opportunity to create own templates
• Issue tracking
• SSL 256bit encryption
• Five different packages including free on
• Opportunity to export all the data and etc.

Pros and cons:

+ descriptions for projects and tasks
+ ability to create task lists
+ separate panel for files in each project
+ separate panel for discussions in each project
+ Blog panel
+ commenting on tasks and files
+ detailed reports
+ Issues panel in projects
+ opportunity to create documents
+ opportunity to create own templates
+ adding tasks and replying to task comments via email

- no subtasks
- poor text formatting in tasks, comments and descriptions (using tags)
- no comments on projects (frankly speaking in this case it’s not a big deal)

Customer support service

The response was received in 2 days – pretty decent result.

Project Mark: 5-

Huddle

Huddle being very decent web-based project management solution gives you simple and secure online workspaces containing powerful project and collaboration tools. It has really nice interface with moveable widgets displaying all the activity across all your workspaces, so you can easily get an overview of what’s going on in your projects. Though it has extra features like Huddle meetings and conferencing, there some things to be added; still in general it produces the impression of a balanced and efficient tool.

The first screenshot we are going to check is Workspace Overview:

This page provides the most important information about your tasks and projects in general: latest activity (what’s new), upcoming tasks and late tasks. It’s a pretty standard view, but sufficient for the majority of users.

Next screenshot presents Task Overview with Comments:

As you can see, it’s very simple (I would even say too simple) – there is no detailed information about the task (just title, description, due date and attachment). However it’s very nice that you can comment on a task.

Finally we will check the screenshot of Discussions page:

Given page represents a simple forum allowing you to edit and delete comments.

Main characteristic features:

• Phone conferencing
• Personalized and multi-language support
• SSL encryption
• Five different packages, including free one
• Opportunity to create whiteboards and etc.

Pros and cons:

+ very easy-to-use tool
+ rich text formatting (except tasks and comments)
+ Discussions panel
+ commenting on tasks and files
+ opportunity to create a document online
+ meeting scheduling
+ descriptions for tasks and files

- no opportunity to create projects
- no subtasks
- no priority for tasks
- no reports

Customer support service

We didn’t get the response at all.

Project Mark: 4-

Related posts:

1. Back to Online Project Management Tools: Part 4
2. Back to Online Project Management Tools: Part 3
3. Back to Online Project Management Tools: Part 1
4. Online Project Management Tools – Part 3
5. Online Project Management Tools Part 1