‘User Specific Tasks’ in Deskera Project Management allows you to easily define access and permission levels for the tasks assigned to each Project Member. These permission levels can be defined by the corresponding Project Administrator. The administrator can easily configure the display of the Project Plan for each Project Member.

Project Administrator can configure the following permission levels for each Project Member

1. Modify Project Plan: The Project Member has access to the complete Project Plan. He can view/edit tasks in the Project Plan similar to the Project Administrator.
2. View Project Plan: The Project Member can view the complete Project Plan but does not have access to modify the Project Plan.
3. Modify Assigned Tasks: The Project Member can only view the tasks assigned to him/her in the Project Plan. Other tasks in the Project Plan cannot be viewed by the Project Member.

We’ve just added process workflows and guides to your Deskera Accounting Dashboard. So if you’re stuck with a process, just go to your dashboard and click on the process you need help with to guide you further.

Deskera 1.1 – Just got even better!

At Deskera, we work round-the-clock to improve product experience. We have recently updated our servers to a new version – version 1.1 – with whole new exciting features – including our next generation Dashboard, Contextual Help, Getting Started tips and more.

To get more hands-on experience, check out the Deskera demo now.

Here is a list of the major features that you will find in the new version:

The New Deskera Dashboard – Mashboard

Deskera 1.1 brings to you the next generation of Dashboards – called ‘Mashboards’- which provide new, and hybrid dashboard design techniques, incorporating all the features of the previous generation dashboards in a real time customizable format. They allow “mashing” or drag-and-drop of content and adding useful applications known as ‘widgets’.

Drag and Drop

The components in the Deskera Dashboard can be moved around and rearranged as per your requirement. This ensures a priority-based unique interface to the dashboard components, for each user of your organization. The users can individually decide the layout of the portal, and add and remove components as per their requirements.

Widget Bar

Add Widgets to your dashboard to access the most important applications directly from it. So, in Deskera CRM you will find widgets to manage your campaigns, leads, contacts and more. Widgets also allow users to lend a more personal touch to their dashboard by allowing them to choose the applications they wish to see.

Quick Add

You can easily add an account, lead, opportunity, contact, case, target or activity from the dashboard using ‘Quick Add’. For that, you need to simply click on the  icon in the corresponding widget to view its simplified form, add relevant information, and submit details for adding information quickly.

Quick View

It provides you with an instant ‘tree view’ of all accounts, leads, products, campaigns and documents. You can easily navigate through this list just as you explore folders in your Operating System. Click on the  icon to expand the list and  icon to collapse it. Click on an ‘entry’ to view details in the adjacent window.

Deskera One Search

You can easily search through all the lists and entries saved in Deskera through Deskera One Search. Just type the term you intend to search and get results instantly without even hitting the enter button.

Contextual Help

Whenever you need any help regarding any link/button, Deskera provides you with a unique feature, wherein you just need to bring the mouse pointer over it and view its details.

Getting Started Tips

If you are new to Deskera, get a useful and quick tour of all major features through the Getting Started Tips. The tour will get you started with Deskera within minutes of logging in. Look out for the  icon on the top right corner of your screen for viewing these tips.

We are excited to hear your feedback. Leave a comment below or send us your feedback on crm@deskera.com.

Deskera Team
wow@deskera.com

We’ll be releasing a brand new version of Deskera – version 1.1 this weekend. Watch this space for features & screenshots updates.

The system will be unavailable from 10pm PST Saturday 14th Nov till 4am PST Sunday 15th Nov as we’ll be upgrading our servers.

Hi all,

Deskera just signed up its 50,000th user ! Its been a long journey since our humble beginnings. We wanted to thank all you users for having faith in us.

It means a lot to us!

Deskera Team
wow@deskera.com

Just because your business management software is on-demand, doesn’t mean you have to give up the feature set of a rich desktop type application – like your favorite spreadsheet. The most basic way to maintain the information you need for customer relationship management is to use a spreadsheet. We all do that. Of course, as your client base grows, you will want advanced, dedicated tools to handle all the data.

That’s when you start using Deskera CRM.

Most CRM packages involve lots of forms, input fields, and connections that need to be set up by hand. Users have to go through a lot of screens just to get a simple task done. Deskera CRM is different: every task is only three clicks long. Our click & type functionality means that every time you see a piece of data, you can select it, edit it, and manipulate it in any way you need – without going through any additional tabs or menus. Much like a spreadsheet, the data is always in your complete control.

Do give it a try.

There are many things a business has to take care of, but at the end of the day, only one of them matters: getting the product out the door and into customers’ hands. That is the biggest part of any business process, and that is why Deskera Project Management is our biggest product.

Deskera Project Management - Managing Events and Calendars

This doesn’t mean Deskera PM is a jumble of screens and buttons. Like all of our productivity tools, it follows the three-click philosophy: you can accomplish any task in just three clicks. This is accomplished via a really well-thought-out UI. A series of nested tabs give you instant access to all the various projects, and all the tools for each project. The project plan screen follows the Click & Type principle, so you never have to go rooting around menus, forms or wizards to change something: if you see the data, you can edit it, right then and there, as if you were working in a spreadsheet.

Deskera Project Management lets you embed gantt charts on your blog or portal

No matter what you’re used to, be it a leading competitor such as Basecamp, or an unwieldy corporate behemoth like Sharepoint, you’ll be delighted by the convenience and functionality of Deskera PM. In fact, we are so confident in the strength of our product, that not only do we offer you a live demo of the system at work (free for you to play around with, as much as you want) and no-brainer pricing, but we’ve also developed an easy way to move projects between Deskera PM and other major project management products. We have no intention of locking you in – we know you’ll be happy with us.

Everything is on the Web these days. After decades of progress, computers have gotten so good at managing all of our information that we can’t imagine ever going back to the old ways. People are so excited about the idea of having their information stored online that it’s already gotten its own set of buzzwords – and all the cool kids have already declared them to be boring.

Nobody can deny the efficiency and usefulness that comes with being able to get to all your data from a browser. Whether you’ve compiled your own Linux kernel, or attended a Windows 7 launch party, services like Gmail have proven that every kind of person enjoys this ease of access, and that even natural fears about security can be overcome if you do it right. Services like Motoblur on new smartphones effectively transfer all your social interaction and scheduling to the Internet, and the crew of the Engadget podcast talks about how they would love to use Facebook as their Rolodex.

But as every software developer knows, it’s not just about the idea – it’s about the execution. Just dumping all of your information on a server isn’t going to be enough, you need to make it convenient for your users. That’s why we built the Deskera Learning Management System. Instead of putting every bell and whistle we could think of into one app (and ending up with the Yahoo! homepage circa 1999), we focused on making an outstanding tool for a specific set of requirements.

The Deskera LMS works in your browser – or anyone else’s browser, in fact – but it reworks the principles of presentation, UI design and functionality that have been perfected by the entire software development community into something uniquely suited for educational institutions. Deskera LMS has its own internal email and document storage facilities, but it’s designed from the ground up to help you manage all the little details of your schoolwork. From online courses and professional certification programs, to brick-and-mortar colleges, Deskera LMS is a friendly and flexible tool that you can use without making huge up-front investments into hardware or software.

Here at Deskera, we are devoted to making business-centric software for people to use. We may use industry-standard jargon, but we like to stay aware that our users are human beings. So although the Deskera tool for managing your employee records is called the Human Resources Management System, we prefer to think of it is talent management.

Deskera HRMS is a convenient place to store and manage all the information about the people that make your company great. From their personal information, such as dependents and spouses, to standard data such as job descriptions and the corporate subordination structure, everything has a logical and easily accessible place in this application. It even

It also provides functions that will simplify the life of your company’s top management – payroll generation, performance assessment, plus instant front-page access to executive summaries such as your monthly expenditure. With pretty graphs and diagrams!

Here’s a nice problem to have: too many people are giving you money. Not to be confused with too many people owing you money, which is a terrible problem to have. We at Deskera can’t tell you how to get in touch with some nice gentlemen of the leg-breaking persuasion, but we can certainly help you out with tracking all of your payments and invoices.

Deskera Accounting is built on a great idea: take the simplest, most straightforward way to do something, the way that requires the least amount of setting up and learning new concepts – and then improve it just enough to make it really, really convenient. Every small business owner has gone through that early stage where they kept a list of outstanding payments in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s the way accounting has been done throughout human history. I think the old Civilization games had double-entry bookkeeping in their science tree. Since almost everyone has a copy of Office (or OpenOffice, or MS Works if you’re a home user who bought your computer from a really silly retailer), a spreadsheet is just the path of least resistance for making a list. Don’t believe us ?

…we only had to watch about five customers using the product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation at all! We hadn’t even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. – Joel Spolsky in The Process of Designing a Product

Using Deskera Accounting is no more difficult than keeping a list in a spreadsheet. There is nothing that you need to know about accounting, or information management, or databases, to get the best out of this tool. But you do get a lot of surprisingly convenient little functions. Not just the sort of thing you’d expect from any competent accounting application, but the sort of thing that makes you go “hey, that’s really cool!”.

Here’s my favorite example. If you go to the Deskera Accounting dashboard and click on Company Preferences > Account Preferences, you’ll see a section called Automatic Number Generation. This is a really simple way to tell Deskera Accounting how to generate invoice numbers. You can enter any combination of letters, numbers and special characters, and that combo will be automatically used in every payment slip you make. Just place zeroes in there somewhere, and the software will replace them with sequential, automatically incrementing numbers.

Of course, this is a basic function of an accounting system, but what I really like is that you can set this up in just a couple of clicks – you don’t have to go looking through a bunch of menus and settings, and figuring out how the software thinks about this particular variable.

It’s no more difficult than typing a number into a spreadsheet.

Deskera eLeave is a tool designed to manage employee attendance. While this is not necessarily a major issue in a small company, keeping track of who’s at work and who needs time off can quickly start to take up too much of a manager’s day. eLeave takes up a lot of the slack, and allows your company to be a lot more efficient, with managers being freed up to deal with issues that really matter.

Every staff member uses a separate account to log into Deskera eLeave, and sees the information relevant to him.  Frontline employees will see their reserve of leave time, categorized by type, as well as a calendar of upcoming scheduled absences. Managers with approval authority will have an expanded set of tools – not just forms to request time off, but ways to authorize or reject applications from their subordinates. A full audit trail and reporting facilities are also there – all to make your life easier.

With Deskera eLeave, you have a functional, affordable and simple way to

Up until now, this blog has been focused on our flagship product, Deskera Project Management. But there is a lot more that Deskera can do for your business! We’ll be talking about all of our products in the future, but the one we are most excited to show you is Deskera CRM.

As important as project management is to a small business, it’s the customer that brings in the money, so managing customer relations is paramount. Deskera CRM will let you do just that, while retaining all the advantages that you’ve come to enjoy from our other web-based business applications.

You can maintain a database of contacts, leads, special offers and promotional campaigns in a powerful, highly-functional Web application, accessible from any browser and usable by your entire team. We’ll be showing you some of our favorite features of Deskera CRM in the next few days. Meanwhile, why don’t you head over to our demo environment and see for yourself?

Basecamp is one of the most popular light-weight project management tools, and with good reason. But many enterprise users are looking for more powerful project planning and collaboration tools. 

As a result, we’ve seen plenty of users who’ve migrated from Microsoft Project and Basecamp to Deskera, looking for a complete solution that meets both their needs of project planning and collaboration.

Deskera already supports import and export of project plans from Microsoft Project. Looking at the sheer number of Basecamp users who wish to migrate to Deskera, we thought it was time to roll out an ‘Import from Basecamp’ feature. 

We wish we could bring in your documents as well, but sadly, Basecamp does not support this. As of now, Basecamp does not support importing of project information from any other tool either. 

For more details on ‘How to import projects from Basecamp’ you can head over to our support forum. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on this.

• Import existing plans from Microsoft Project
• Sync Deskera calendars to Microsoft Outlook and others using iCal
• Export Deskera project plans to Microsoft Project
• Export plans and reports to .pdf and .csv files
• Embed project plans anywhere on the web
• Import/Export your existing contacts from Microsoft Outlook and via .csv files
• E-mail Notifications for tasks and to-dos
• RSS feeds for project updates

Plus we know that the real way to lock in customers is to give them the keys.

Ready to migrate from Basecamp? Sign Up to manage your projects the way you really want to.

P.S. Also, let us know if there’s any other tool you wish to migrate project data from. We’ll do it.

Or any other feed reader of your choice – Google, Yahoo, Thunderbird, Netvibes, FeedDemon, Krawler[x] and even web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)  is a way for content publishers to make news, blogs, and other content available to subscribers.

Using the Global RSS Feed provided in Deskera, you can get notified of updates across all your projects.

Individual RSS Feeds are also provided for:

1. Individual Project Updates
2. To-Do List Updates for each project
3. Event Updates for each project and
4. Individual Calendar feeds as well

All you need to do is click on the  icon, subscribe directly by selecting your Feed Reader (Microsoft Outlook, Google, Yahoo, etc.) or you can also copy the URI from the address bar and paste it into your reader.

Deskera is the only truly Microsoft Project Compatible project management software available. You can import your existing Microsoft Project plans, collaborate on them and export the updated plan back to Microsoft Project.

Now Deskera allows you to embed your project plan anywhere on the web.

1. Get the embed code from the Export option in Deskera
2. Paste it into your website, blog or any HTML editor
3. You can change the dimensions of the plan to suit the destination

Some of the benefits:

1. Any updates to the plan in Deskera will automatically be reflected
2. Search-as-you-type on your embedded plan
3. View the true Work Breakdown Structure – expand task lists for a complete view
4. View task details on the Gantt Chart as well
5. Give your clients and project stakeholders complete visibility – Accurate project status. Every time.
6. Get feedback on your project plan from colleagues and experts.

Also now you can not only work on your Microsoft Project Plans on the web, but also publish them anywhere on the web. Deskera is definitely the best Microsoft Project Viewer around!

Embed Project Plans – Increase Visibility. Incorporate Feedback. Improve Efficiencies.

What are you waiting for? Sign Up.