clicklady's dashboard

DeskAway Templates is live on all paid plans - please check out this link first: http://www.deskaway.com/help/project-...

I was looking at this report a few minutes ago, and it was listing the tasks in reverse order. Unfortunately, I submitted a bug (before I checked here) recommending sorting in order of due date, but I like clicklady's suggestion to sort in oder the user has input. – carolarms, on July 08, 2008 20:56

Hey, thanks for your thoughts on the template feature. What you will be allowed to "clone" within a project are - project details, milestones, tasklists + tasks, doc templates and users within the project. Best of all, you will be able to choose which of these you want to 'templatize' using checkboxes from an existing project. So, lets say you have created a project and you only want to 'templatize' the tasklists, you can skip the milestones etc. part of it.
When loading this template in a new project, only the task lists and tasks would get included. And since you didn't choose the 'project team', all tasks will default to be assigned to 'Anyone' in the project.

Everything will come with due dates and you can change this later. Templates will be created off an existing project and stored. When a new project needs to be created, you can choose which template you want to load.

I am currently trying another system that has a nice "copy" feature. True templating may be the single most important feature we need. I see a lot of value in DeskAway and have also signed up for an account and will soon convert it to the minimum paid category, and would like to share my ideas on this with you -- I have given this feature a lot of thought.

Like others, we do many highly repetitive projects and would benefit greatly from this ability. The two issues are (a) specific task assignments and (b) specific dates. For specific task assignments, I think I have a good solution. The system should allow tasks in a template to be assigned by role rather than by person. Then, when a project is cloned from a template, it should be possible to map roles to specific people. Important - it must be possible to assign the same person to more than one role. This would do very nicely.

On dates, I do not have a perfect solution. I suppose that defining the all due dates in a template as an offset from the project start date would provide a decent first approximation. However, "Work expands to fill the time allotted to it." For us, an otherwise very similar project might have anywhere from one week to two months to complete, and the due date offsets will vary inevitably in such cases. If anyone can think of something better, I'd love to hear it. One possible improvement would be to have a choice when setting up a due date in a template: Either an offset from the start date, or a percentage of the way through the entire project. This all can get very complicated and brings up the whole concept of task dependence, which I believe is not in DeskAway and you probably don't want it, and I understand that.

I hope these ideas are useful and look forward to seeing what you come up with for this feature. You are wise to recognize this is not a quickie feature, and I am glad to see that.

Re-ordering Task Lists is live:

Follow these simple steps to re-order Task Lists within a project:

1. Goto the Task page by clicking on the Tasks link
2. Provided you have more than 1 Task List, click on the link on the right which says "Re-order Task Lists". This will take you to a new page.
3. Drag Task Lists to change their ordering.
4. Once done, click on "Save This Task List Order"
5. Go back to the Task page to see your new Task List order

We have begun development on the project template functionality - something like a "clone" project and then reuse that when creating new projects.
Will post ETA's here.

Thanks, Sal. And I appreciate the automatic follow-up. Good system.

Excellent, Sal! – clicklady, on June 17, 2008 15:56

This feature is going to go live this week after testing :-)

Sorry for the delay but this has been fixed today with other changes.

Got it. Thanks for your feedback. – sal, on June 16, 2008 06:24

Have been evaluating your product, and so far I'm impressed. But I don't think I would sign up to make 'production' use of it without template functionality. It would waste too much time. As a minimum, we need to be able to replicate milestones, tasks and timelines. If we could also replicate a standard set of documents (project initiation document, etc) that would be a huge bonus. – Al, on June 14, 2008 21:45

We are still in planning stages. This is not a small functionality that we can just add in a week. I understand the importance of this and it will be done.

Oh. Will check this ASAP.