“My experiences with EMDESK are very positive. It’s a clear, convenient, self-explanatory and user-friendly system. Access procedures are easy, uncomplicated and access can be granted fast. The overall system is clear, for instance for project selection, activity and task selection. And it’s really useful that customisation automatically ensures that project details are only displayed for our own company. Also the warnings that company details, such as key personnel descriptions, when entered, are final and cannot be amended unless with the coordinator’s intervention, are helpful. I particularly found it a major advantage that I could do the input immediately into the document by entering the text or through copy and paste, in contrast to some other document-sharing systems. The fact that you can see which users are online and have been working on the document for how long can be useful; it gives some idea of how active some of the members are. And, of course, the output in pdf-version is also a very neat feature. I’ve used several systems and would love to see this to be used as a general system for all/most projects. This would be a tremendous improvement. Seeing that in some cases document-sharing is still not being used, such a general user-friendly system like EMDESK is a great tool.”

“EMDESK is a useful and functional online tool, which facilitates the management of EU projects financed under the 7th Framework Programme. EMDESK has positively evolved since its launch and the administration services react promptly to fix bugs and inconsistencies. More importantly, they are always open to hear recommendations for EMDESK improvement and to act accordingly for its implementation. Customer support via E-mail is quite acceptable; however, a hotline service could certainly speed-up the response time. A comprehensive EMDESK Manual would also be helpful.

EMDESK differentiates itself from other competitors due to its user-friendly interface and the wide range of functions it offers. In short, EMDESK offers good value for money. Although improvements are always possible and necessary, we are -generally speaking- quite satisfied with EMDESK and would eventually consider it for projects we have in the pipeline.”

“There are many reasons why the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft has decided to conclude a framework contract with EMDESK. A main advantage of EMDESK is that it is especially tailored to the requirements of research projects in the 7th Framework Programme - thus it is possible to administrate the proposal creation as well as the negotiation and project implementation with only one system.

After the evaluation by the project management team of the Fraunhofer EU-Network and the Fraunhofer SIT (Institute for Secure Information technology) EMDESK clearly convinced us because of its usability. It also fulfills the strict data-protection standards of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.”

“EMDESK is an impressive document entry system that is very well put together - especially as it improves to address large research teams.”

“We found EMDESK quite useful when writing our recent FP7 call bid for the following tasks: Making a template for our bid document, with all the tables required according to the EC guidelines, and particularly cross-referencing the work packages, milestones and efforts across tables; and collecting the information about individual participants - organisations and individuals. It was useful that this information could be collected in parallel and at the convenience of the multiple parties.”

“I found EMDESK to be a valuable tool and can warmly recommend its use.”

“EMDESK is quite good as a structuring tool for the proposal, especially when working with partners that don't have much experience with EU proposals. And when starting with EMDESK, it's an immense help in the early phase of project preparation. EMDESK proved helpful as a structuring tool, especially with the formal parts.”

“I would like to say that EMDESK is a pretty good tool and most probably I'll be using it forwards on - it has quite a lot of added value compared to the "typical" mail-circulation/SVN approach”.

“In general I think EMDESK is really good and a huge improvement over previously available tools.”

“It was the first time I have used EMDESK and my feedbacks are contrasting since I found it very useful for all the administrative and financing aspects, and a bit difficult to manage the textual part of the Part B of the proposal, even if it was very useful in the tables formatting. It means that the tool is excellent for all the formatted aspects (tables, lists, etc.) but tricky for the textual part including the pictures insertion.”

“I was quite surprised and pleased to discover EMDESK and its features. I fully agree with such an innovative approach, from document-centric to semantic-centric and model-driven, allowing a single common reference for much information, and making the proposal building much more efficient. All initiatives should be fostered that can help project partner to ease the submission process, especially in SMEs where the participation in such proposals is time-consuming and at first quite cumbersome.
On the contrary, this is a huge change and a kind of disruption in everyone's habits. Thus, my advice is to make it as simple and convivial as possible, mainly in the web pages, the available menus and offered additional features.”

“I must say that the EMDESK platform was a very effective mean of proposal preparation; within few minutes I was able to navigate within the platform despite my not extensive experience in FP7 proposal preparation. If possible, pop-up help text with explanation of specific entries would help less experienced people, especially in the financial information section. I would say that, at least for the specific kind of project small or medium-scale focused research project (STREP) the EMDESK is worth to be further used and developed.”

“The main benefit of EMDESK to me was simply not having to battle with Microsoft Word too much. Documents get corrupted very easily when multiple people on different systems work on the same document, especially as it travels over email. EMDESK helps a great deal in that respect. The auto-generation features for the Gantt Chart, WP tables and other bits are also very useful. I feel EMDESK is a positive direction for proposal writing.”

“EMDESK is an interesting tool at least for the proposal phase, where I used it. For collecting input from multiple partners it is particularly valuable. The traditional method of sending Word documents by email is difficult, especially if there are many partners contributing to the same document. As a partner, I only used EMDESK to enter our organisational and financial information, person months and task descriptions as plain text. Using a tool like EMDESK could actually enable one to finish the entire Part B in clean formatting without having trouble with people having different versions of Word, different formatting manners. It could offer automated support for adding references and to referring automatically numbered figs and tables. These often generate problems when using Word for editing.”

“I would like to point out the following advantages of EMDESK: It is a tool that follows the required structure of proposal writing. The visual design of the input forms is very good. It is an easy to use tool. In summary EMDESK is a very good help to prepare a proposal.”

“In fact I liked EMDESK, thanks for this. It's a nice tool that provides a good overview of the things that need to be filled out. In particular in the beginning phases of the project proposal it was of much help.”

“A very strong point of EMDESK is the very good integration of the proposal's logic. It is really pleasant to enter the values only once and then to be sure that whatever is changed, it will be correctly computed. The overall structure and organisation is also very valuable, it helps building a proposal by adding small chunks.”