DeskAway: SaaS play in Project Management

SaaS has been a buzzword in last couple of years, and many biggies and startups are jumping in the fray to mimic traditionally locally-hosted appliances for HR, Finance, CRM and Project Management software online, as SaaS. It gives organizations the simplicity of not needing to host, develop and maintain these packages allowing them to focus on their core business. Of course, there is still time before really large organizations start trusting a third party to host their confidential data, and shed their reluctance of losing control over features and customization. But certainly, adoption in the SME space is quite evident.

Many Indian tech firms are trying their hand at this new phenomenon. TracBac (visual collaboration for creative designers – reviewed here), HelpDeskPilot (Customer Support – reviewed here) and HRWorks (HR management) are some notable efforts. In international market, 37Signals are arguably the best known, for their project management software Basecamp and the buzz generating web framework Ruby on Rails, and Zoho suite from an Indian company AdventNet, who are successfully taking on the likes of Google in online office tools space, with many rave reviews.

There is a new Mumbai based player in the market, named DeskAway. It’s a project management suite similar to BaseCamp. As per their founder, Sahil, they are trying to differentiate themselves by focusing on the niche of creative projects, with target customers being media agencies, studios, freelance web designers etc, and by providing more features. It is free upto 3 projects with 5 people and basic paid plan starts at 10$ a month. Free account is entitled to 25 MB of space.

Here is a screenshot of the dashboard (See their tour for more screenshots) -

The UI has a clean, uncluttered look and the response time was pretty fast as well. I could add a project, add team members to it and assign tasks to them easily. An uncommon feature they’ve provided is ‘Blog’ to share ideas etc. But I would have loved to see a Wiki, rather than a blog, so that specs can be edited collaboratively (agile people do this a lot). The Reports tab looks pretty good on first impression at least. It offers several MPP like graphs, very useful for a person managing multiple projects. I am curious about the integration features offered. For example, having an Outlook plugin, so that team members can be directly added using a DL, would be very intuitive. Integration with MPP will be cool as well. I requested these features through ‘Request a feature’ link they’ve provided. There was a minor glitch (404 error) when I clicked on ‘desktop calendar integration’ link, apart from which, the execution from the team Synage looks very neat and bug free.

Right now, the tool doesn’t seem to be offering a lot of features focused on creative designers community, unlike TracBac. May be they are planning to release features in that direction soon. Overall, thumbs up to the team at Synage for a very clean looking SaaS product. It is targeted at the global market, so the competition is pretty tough (look at the number of BaseCamp alternatives here.) But if they could target some niche markets effectively, they have a very good chance.

Written by Sumedh Inamdar