Deskaway is a web based project management tool by an Indian startup, Synage. Their product offering overlaps with one of Adventnet's many services - Zoho Projects. I'd like to delve into both, and discuss their respective strategies.

Previously, I had looked at Zoho and Slideshare, two rapidly growing Indian web intiatives. One of the standout differences between these two closely related service offerings is Zoho's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach versus Slideshare's single-minded focus.

Looking at Zoho and DeskAway now, both have almost identical features:

• Meaningful URLs (e.g. http://neemtree.deskaway.com, http://neemtree.projects.zoho.com)
• Add/edit projects
• Project dashboards
• Milestones, task lists, and tasks
• Calendar events
• Timesheets
• Reports, Gantt charts
• Team member management
• File tracking
• Discussion tracking

DeskAway

Zoho Projects

And both also have similar pricing plans:

DeskAway

Zoho Projects

Zoho leads in the responsive help space, with its active support forums. Both firms take the same approach to marketing, with numerous and visible social media features.

Which leaves us with a few, but important differentiators:

• User interface: Detailed analysis of DeskAway's interface and screenshots of Zoho's interface demonstrate this key differentiator. The user interface differences are subtle, but make project management activities that much quicker in DeskAway.
• Another of DeskAway's timesaver features is the ability to import/export team members.
• DeskAway allows for project issue tracking.
• DeskAway also offers the ability to backup your entire project.
• Zoho does offer the implied benefit of integrating with its eighteen other product offerings; however the holes in that integration have been discussed.

In the earlier contemplation of Slideshare and Zoho, there wasn't a definitive conclusion, other than 'lets see which approach benefits each company'. Having pondered on this some more, I now believe that a focussed strategy will serve these startups best. Slideshare and DeskAway should continue building on their strengths, presentation sharing and project management, respectively. They should do so consciously and deliberately, not just because they may not have the resources to expand into other spaces. Despite Zoho's momentum, I don't believe its everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach will be sustainable. My primary reasons for this opinion are (1) first hand experience when a client turned down Zoho (despite its pricing, feature set, and IP policies) due to poor user experiences and (2) looking at the 'lessons learnt' in a Drupal vs Wordpress retrospective (more on that later).

Here's wishing well to a thriving Indian web industry, they're sure to keep impressing.