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Zoho Projects How-To: Using the ‘Client’ user role
Here’s a couple of reasons why you should be giving a closer look to the ‘Client’ user role in Zoho Projects.
Zoho Projects is available in 15 languages. That means your client, Senor Juan Antonio Gómez can login to the projects you share with him and view them on a Spanish interface.
Let’s say you assign one of other user roles like Administrator, Manager, Employee and Contractor to your client. He gets to see all the project details to the micro level, till that ‘Put if check in pageload.js to take care of IE6′ task of your web developer, which sure he is not interested in. So you add Senor Gómez as a Client user.
Now he can view only the Milestones that are marked External (and Task Lists, Tasks associated with it). The trick here is to add a parallel list of Milestones matching your internal ones and have tasks defined at a more macro level. This procedure also allows you to have a separate list of tasks that require inputs from, or the tasks that are to be done by your client.
Above all, making your client as part of your projects improves transparency and your client will love the way he/she is able to see the project progressing live, easily collaborating with your team all the time.
Are you using the Client user role in Zoho Projects, making your clients part of the projects and bringing in transparency? Tell us about it in the comments.
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Top 12 Reasons for Using Zoho Projects
Looking for a project management tool to manage your projects? Here’s a dozen reasons why you should choose Zoho Projects.
12. Available in major languages
Your mother tongue is not English or you have an international team placed in many countries? Zoho Projects is available now in 15 international languages - Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish. And the list is growing.
11. Gantt Charts
Want to know visually how your projects are progressing? You can click on the Reports tab of Zoho Projects and the Gantt charts will give you a bird’s eye view of your project’s status (based on open/closed tasks and for each user).
10. Timesheet
Make your client billing easy. Ask your team to fill up the hours they put in for each of their tasks. Zoho Projects provides the option to export timesheets as xls/csv. And to specify non-billable hours too (say, team meetings).
9. Better User Management
You can classify your project members based on their roles - Administrators, Managers, Employees, Contractors & Clients. Each role has pre-defined access privileges. List Milestones as ‘External’ for your clients to view and monitor how their project is progressing.
8. Calendar
Zoho Projects’ Calendar function gives an easy view of tasks, milestones & meetings planned for the month. You can add tasks etc from the calendar view itself. iCal is supported and you can export your Zoho Projects calendar to iCal supported calendars like Google Calendar.
7. Email & RSS notifications
Tasks can be edited, their status modified. And you can set email notifications so that other team members are notified of the task’s changes. Zoho Projects offers authenticated RSS feeds too which team members can subscribe to.
6. Integration with other Zoho apps
A major plus for Zoho Projects compared to other project management applications. When you sign up for Zoho Projects, each of your project members gets free access to the whole suite of Zoho applications (as Zoho has a single sign on system).
5. Forums
A central place to discuss what’s happening in each project. You can even embed html code snippets, say a video in YouTube or a Zoho Sheet spreadsheet/chart with project figures.
4. Centralized Document Management
You can bulk upload project documents and make Zoho Projects your online repository. View/edit the documents, spreadsheets, presentations using the appropriate Zoho app (Zoho Writer/Sheet/Show) without downloading and viewing/editing them each time using a desktop-based application.
3. Variety of Task Options
Club tasks as task lists and several task lists as Milestones. Set dependency among tasks. Create task list and project templates for easy duplication. Assign multiple owners to a task. Set end date, email notification for each task. Assign priority (color coded), edit the task completion status, add Notes. And associate forum topics, documents to a task.
2. Improved Collaboration and Transparency
If you are a small team collaborating on a project, what better way than to have all the tasks listed centrally with their completion status? Combine this with all projects documents being available centrally with a forum to discuss the project happenings, you have a transparent system that allows easy project execution through collaboration.
1. Affordable Price
No large upfront fees. Pay-as-you-go. You can manage upto 10 projects for as low as $12 per month. There is a free version for managing one project. Zoho Projects allows having unlimited users even for the free plan. Check out Zoho Projects’ pricing plans.
Try Zoho Projects now for all your project management needs.
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How a Business Coaching & Solutions Company is using Zoho Projects
Holly L. Hanson is the COO of Techström, a business coaching and solutions company. Holly partners with Jeffrey Watts to work with their clients in developing the right solution for them. Holly wrote in to tell us about how Techström is using Zoho Projects.
Techström has over 25 years of experience in business coaching, strategy development and software implementation. We manage many different types of projects at once - marketing, planning, direct mail campaigns, software implementation, equipment purchases and CEO training. In the past, we tried to manage projects through Microsoft Project and Projixx. Microsoft Project was too cumbersome. It took longer to build the project specs than it did to do the project. Projixx had less set-up time but lacked the multiple levels of functionality we needed.
Recently, for one of our consulting clients, we reviewed several project management software. As we reviewed Basecamp, Projixx, Google Business with add-ons, we could see Zoho had the superior product. The client we were reviewing this product for had multiple offices nationally and internationally. With Zoho Projects, each of their team members can have their version in their language and the client chose to go with Zoho. Since this decision, we have turned 2 more clients on to Zoho and we will continue to recommend it to our clients as an excellent hosted solution. Over all, we have approximately 25 users across 3 companies with 3-10 projects at each location.
With Zoho Projects, we could create templates for the different types of projects saving time and creating a workflow for our process. This assists us much as we add more people to a project. Having a hosted solution also helps. We no longer need to purchase software or back-up software as it is all handled through Zoho.
Our business is about collaboration and creating systems that run smoothly. Zoho Projects facilitates the collaboration and keeps the conversations going. We use the forum function much as we continue to develop our communication in Projects.
Our company uses the Tasks and Milestones to create our project plans and keep our team on track. Being able to share files and upload the supporting documentation for each project has improved communication on projects tremendously and has kept our team organized. When we first looked at Zoho Projects, we were thinking of it as an internal tool. We are now inviting clients and contractors to view and collaborate on projects within the Zoho system.
We have been so impressed with Zoho Projects that we have created a Zoho Business account and are continuing to advise our clients to switch to the Zoho platform for all of their business needs.
If you are using Zoho Projects, do let us know how you are using it.
Zoho Projects Case Study : toneee.com
Glad to share with our readers how toneee.com is using Zoho Projects. toneee.com is a company offering web development solutions. They not only design websites but also provide database development, document imaging, merchant services etc. Tone Williams, who owns the company explains in his own words, how he and his team are effectively using Zoho Projects.
Our Design Process involves dozens of tasks divided into 6 phases. We are able to quickly incorporate our existing process into Zoho Projects using the Tasks & Milestones area. We group tasks into Task Lists, and Task Lists into Milestones, which matches the phases of our design process. Furthermore, the system is flexible enough to create “Project Templates”, which inserts all tasks, task lists, and milestones into a brand new project in a single click! This saves our Project Manager an enormous amount of administrative/set-up time and practically eliminates human error during the set-up process.
The Dashboard allows our team members to review what is going on with a particular project, including the most recent documents uploaded, the most recent forum entries, and the items assigned to that member for the entire week. The Dashboard is referred to several times a day, since things change regularly with every project.
One of our most frequently used areas is the Forums. This is our central place of communication between our employees, contractors, suppliers, and customers. We oftentimes use categories to organize our conversations, since a single project may involve several services. In the above example, the client has a Web Maintenance Plan, and can request us to update the company website on-demand. Because the client also uses us for Merchant Services, we categorize e-commerce related enquiries/posts under “Merchant Service Items”.
More details about this case study here. Do tell us how you are using Zoho Projects in the comments or by filling up this form.
Zoho Projects : Export all Timesheet Data as a Spreadsheet
Zoho Projects has had this feature for quite some time now - to export an employee’s Timesheet as an xls or csv file. And one of the requests from our users has been to enhance this and allow the timesheet data of all employees to be exported as a single file. This is available now in the latest Zoho Projects update.
Managers and Administrators can now export timesheet data of all users under a project and all users across all projects. Once the timesheet data gets exported, an email containing a link to the file to be downloaded gets sent.
Export timesheet for a project’s users (Project -> Timesheet -> Export)
Export for all users across all pages (My Home -> My Log Calendar -> Export)
Try this new feature in Zoho Projects and let us know your comments.
Zoho Projects : Create Project templates, Bulk upload documents and more
Today’s Zoho Projects update brings in a few more goodies.
Project Templates : Zoho Projects has had Tasklist Templates for quite some time now. This has now been enhanced to include defining whole projects as templates. In addtion to defining tasklists, you can now have Milestones (consisting of various tasklists), documents, forum posts & users added to a template. And whenever a new project is created, you needn’t start from scratch but make a copy of a suitable project template (whereever applicable).
Bulk Upload Documents : Typically, when a new project gets started, you upload various documents like requirement docs, drawings, design plans, test procedures etc related to that project. What better way than to choose once and upload all of them in one go? Zoho Projects now offers multiple file uploads.
Log time : Logging time has now been made easier. A clock icon comes on moving your mouse over the days in the calendar view. You can click on it and log the time for your tasks in that project.
You can also log time, edit the logged time in the List View under the Timesheet tab now.
Do try the latest features in Zoho Projects.
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Zoho Projects Update : Multiple Admins, Task - Documents/Forums Mapping etc
Zoho Projects underwent an update just now and the below features are now available.
Multiple Admins : Till now, Zoho Projects followed the single admin concept. But from now on, there can be multiple admins. The one who created the Zoho Projects account is assigned the super-admin / portal owner role. And he/she can designate other members as Administrators. These administrators have all the privileges as the portal owner except upgrading/downgrading the Zoho Projects account & changing the credit card details.
Task-Documents and Task-Forums Mapping : Along with adding Notes to a task (which is useful for knowing a task’s status etc), documents uploaded to Zoho Projects and discussion forums created for a project can now be associated with tasks. Multiple documents/forums can be associated with a task and a forum/document can be associated with any number of tasks.
Managers can add Clients : Project members in Manager role can now add (external) client members to the projects they manage. This gives a Manager fuller control over the project(s) he/she manages.
Separate iCal link for Google Calendar : Google Calendar follows the VEVENT component versus the VTODO component that needs to be followed for tasks/tasklists/milestones. To support GCal, Zoho Projects now has a separate GCal link. Clicking on the links, you can download an .ics file which you can import into your iCalendar / Google Calendar.
Test drive the new features in Zoho Projects and we would be glad hearing your comments.
Zoho Projects : Working with Tasks
Let’s see the possibilities that Zoho’s project management application offers when working with tasks.
- You define a task which forms part of a larger tasks list. And this task list can be Internal or External, can be associated with a Milestone or not
- You can choose to Send Mail Notification whenever a new task is created, gets assigned
- In the real world, most tasks are accomplished through team work. Zoho Projects allows you to associate a task to multiple team members
- Typical project management involves Start and End dates not just for Milestones reached but for individual tasks also. And you can do this with Zoho Projects
- You can set the priority of each task as High, Medium, Low or None
- A task’s progress can be monitored as you can edit a task and change the % Completed field status. And each task’s status is reflected in the Gantt chart view under Reports
How are you using Zoho Projects? Please do let us know in the comments.
Customization Options in Zoho Projects
As a versatile project management tool, Zoho Projects offers quite a few options that can be customized. Let’s see some of those here. All these options are accessible by clicking on the Settings link at the top-right (and the tabs there - General Settings, Company Settings)
- Skins : Not everyone likes the UI of an app to be of the same color. And it depends on your mood too. Choose from 5 different colors
- Set the UI’s language of choice (In fact, this is the primary reason for this blog post - we got a query from a user asking us whether Zoho Projects had a Spanish UI option). Zoho Projects supports 14 different languages
- Another cool option is to set your Company’s logo (instead of the default Zoho Projects one)
- Each user can have his/her information like nick name, phone numbers, photo etc to form a profile of their own
- Change your default password (and for changing it from time to time, for added security)
- Your company’s profile, including address, time zone. And the email encoding you would like to use (Languages like Japanese, Korean etc require encoding other than UTF-8 to be set)
- Time and date format settings : Set how you would like time/date to appear across Zoho Projects screens
Utilize the above options to get the maximum out of Zoho Projects.
Centralized Document Management with Zoho Projects
As a project management tool online, Zoho Projects is a nice solution for teams working collaboratively on projects.
A project typically will have a good many files associated with it and what better way than to have them all maintained & managed at a central place. In Zoho Projects, each project has a Documents tab which lists all documents/files uploaded by its project members.
Zoho Projects’ integration with Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet helps a lot too. You can open .doc, files in Zoho Writer and .xls files in Zoho Sheet directly. This eliminates the conventional way of working with Office documents - download them first to your desktop & then opening them using a desktop based software.
And here’s more. Once you open & edit such files in Zoho Writer or Zoho Sheet, you can save them back directly inside Zoho Projects’ Documents module! Add to this, the versioning support that the Documents module of Zoho Projects offers, you have a good, centralized document management system in your hands.
Try Zoho Projects now for your project and document management needs. We would be glad hearing your feedback.
Recent blog posts mentioning Zoho
Curtis Partridge at Small Business Tech blog in a post titled ‘Zoho Portfolio Continue to Grow‘ says,
One company that has been quietly building a stunning collection of applications is Zoho. They now offer an impressive array of software including office applications, invoicing, project management, and customer relationship management, database, and more. They have formed world-wide alliance partnerships around the globe to assist small business with using their products. They seem much more serious than others about developing a cloud computing business beyond the geek crowd.
In the coming weeks, we are going to dig more deeply into each of the Zoho applications and compare functionality with other online-based products.
We are eagerly waiting to hear what you would have to say about Zoho, Curtis!
Looking for a free or affordable project management app? David Glumac from Budapest, Hungary suggests some ‘alternatives to MS Project‘. David writes about Zoho Projects,
The team at Zoho is one of the coolest “Web 2.0” companies out there. Their online office suite includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, CRM, project management, invoicing and other applications. Being web-native, all Zoho applications are operating system independent. It supports creating tasks, ownership, setting deadlines and tracking milestones; working with calendars, Gantt charts, reports, share supporting files—all the cool features expected in a project management package.
Anali at the MCLC Library Tech Talk blog in her ‘Talking Tech Friday - Zoho‘ post does a brief overview of some of the Zoho apps.
Just to prove that Google doesn’t rule the world, I thought I would do a brief overview of the Zoho suite of online tools.
[Zoho Sheet] looks very much like Excel, and also allows you to import or export .xls files from or to your computer. You can embed sheets into a blog or website, collaborate with others, and use a broader variety of tools than with Google Spreadsheets, including macros. One feature I just noticed here, and is the same for Writer, is you can export in a wide variety of formats, including .xls, xml, html, pdf, open office, etc. Very handy!
The [Zoho] wiki uses a nicer WYSIWYG interface than many wiki or blog editing applications I’ve seen. No silly wiki text markup (the bane of my existence), and it looks nicer to me than the PB Wiki design. However, the wiki allows you to choose your own editor, set your own brand and logo, and manage editing and viewing permissions.
Enda Madden at his SaaS Technologies blog says ‘Run your business with Zoho‘.
The last few months I’ve been road testing the Zoho applications by using it for my own company’ day to day administration. Originally Zoho was best known for their meeting application software which was a great substitute for WebEx. Over the last year they’ve constantly added new useful apps and at this stage have almost anything that any SME business would need.
One of my personal favourites is Zoho Invoicing which is a quick and very smart way to generate estimates and invoices http://invoice.zoho.com/login/jsp/login.jsp).
Better still it integrates into Zoho CRM.
Thanks to all the above bloggers!
Zoho Projects Update : Task Dependency & more
One of the most asked for functionalities in Zoho Projects is finally here. Dependency of tasks! And the current update brings in a few more useful features as well. The update in detail :
Task Dependency : You can now set dependency among tasks. A Task can now be made dependent on one or more tasks being completed.
Assigning a Task to Multiple Users : This is another much asked for feature from our customers. Zoho Projects now lets you split & assign a Task among multiple users.
Uniform Date format : Set a date format under ‘Settings’ -> ‘Company Settings’ -> ‘Date/Time Format’. And this format gets reflected throughout the rest of the Zoho Projects UI screens.
Clear Task date : It’s now easy to clear the start or end dates of a Task in case you have decided to reassign dates at a later point of time. Previously, you’d to delete the Task and add it again without dates.
Delete Forum category : This extends the forum post deletion function. Now, entire forum categories can be deleted.
Delete Project : An extension to ‘Clear Project’ that deletes the whole project. Be cautious while using forum & project deletion. The data can’t be retrieved.
Other than the above, a few bugs have been fixed too. Try Zoho Projects & do post your comments below.
Zoho Projects now part of Zoho Single Sign-On
Are you using many of Zoho’s apps and signing in separately to Zoho Projects everytime? Not anymore. Zoho Projects, the easy online tool for project management is now part of Zoho’s single sign-on system. You can now use your Zoho ID (or the email address you used while registering with Zoho) to login to your Zoho Projects account. If you are logging into Zoho Projects for the first time using your Zoho ID, you’ll be asked to choose your domain name.
If you have an account with Zoho Projects alone, you can use the same email address and password to access other Zoho apps now as well. If you face any issues in accessing Zoho Projects, do leave your comment below or write to us at support@zohoprojects.com
Get the max out of Zoho!
Pai writes about using Zoho Creator and Zoho DB & Reports.
You can now build powerful and sharable databases online for free thanks to websites like Zoho. You don’t even need any special database development experience to create online databases that you can access any time from any browser.
Zoho DB & Reports offers the best “Free” online database service, hands down. It is extremely easy to create your own database and the performance is impressive. The databases run rather quickly which was a pleasant surprise. There doesn’t appear to be any limits in place for the number of databases you can create for free nor how large they can grow so I do not know how many records a Zoho database can contain. You can share any database with anyone you want by simply adding their email address and sending them a link.
Zoho Creator is another database creation service they offer but don’t get them confused. While they describe it as a Database Application builder, it does a lot more than that. Zoho Creator is a lot more complex than Zoho DB so it will not be as easy to use straight out of the gate. It offers an excellent interface builder for creating customized forms for your database application. They now even offer the ability to build database applications for the mobile platform and have their own API for those interested in building more complex databases.
Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily & Rick Broida at BNET Business Hacks recommend Zoho DB & Reports too.
One of the good personal finance blogs that we follow is Ramit Sethi’s. Ramit in a latest post of his embeds Zoho Sheets to show how one can track the money being spent. Joseph (Joe) Kennedy has a nice chart of when to run your home appliances and save on your electricity bills. PGE customers in Portland, please take note. For others, you can prepare a similar chart. Publish it in your blog and it’ll benefit you & your readers. From Joe’s post,
Running at the wrong time of day can cost double or triple what it costs to run in off-peak hours. At current rates, that can add up to a few dollars a month. Granted, it’s not always convenient to do a few loads of laundry after 10pm. But, if you run one load a night, to keep up with the laundry generated, that wouldn’t be so bad.
As an aside, I love zoho.com. Dump Microsoft Office. Zoho is online. It’s free. It lets you save your documents into a format compatible with office. And easily embeds in your blogs. Nearly a dozen other tools, as well.
Ranjan Verma twittered about a Zoho Creator app which will search/compare different mutual funds. Hope we will get to see it in his blog (another one I follow for tips on personal finance & stocks!) soon.
Consulting Pulse writes about the Web 2.0 technologies & programs they use and which of them are worth paying for. About Zoho, they have this to say:
What did I ever do without an online word processor? Just one year ago I was happy wandering along in desktop land with my version of word, then I came across this in an internet search.
Absolutely changed the way I work! Today ALL of my documents are backed up on Zoho, all of my reports are there, I write the first drafts of my posts there and I am starting to use other elements of the service as well. For example, I am dead keen to learn about their project management software and will probably be starting a project there shortly.
If (when?) I ever go into business for myself Zoho will probably be my office productivity suite of choice.
Shameless Reviews (what a name!) on Zoho:
Everyone knows that MS Office XP dents the pocket. Worse with MS Office Vista. You’ll gurgle money to the tune of $300 for a bloated app that tends to require patch after patch. What would you give to have the functionality of MS Office without the price tag? (free) Visit Zoho Office. Don’t worry, you aren’t buying MS Office software online at some discount shop. You’re actually going to word process and spreadsheet your data fully online.
Imagine: now my laptop need to strain and groan under 2GB of bloatware! Once you zoho [Note to Zoli : here’s one more person using Zoho as a verb!], there’s no coming back. I know I’m hooked
Thanks to all the bloggers above for using Zoho! Be it a program to monitor your weight, tracking your monthly spend, reducing your electricity charges, investing in the right MF, backing-up your documents / database or managing your projects, remember, Zoho is there to help you out 
ps : Site24×7, our website monitoring service is offering a 40% discount till this month end. Head there if you want your website(s) availability monitored round-the-clock.
Zoho Projects Update : More options in Timesheet, Doc Management etc
The latest Zoho Projects update added quite a few handy features. You can now add links to web pages and embed HTML code snippets (of say Zoho Show presentations and YouTube videos) related to your projects in a separate Links section under ‘Documents’. The links can be tagged for easy classification and can be searched across.
Non-billable hours for tasks done unrelated to the project can now be mentioned in the Timesheet. Export options (both per project and across multiple projects for a user) now support billable/non-billable hours as well.
Project-related documents that you store centrally at Zoho Projects are now made sortable based on name. And in case of multiple persons in your team having the same first name - the email address will get shown in the Task Owner field for easy differentiation.
A few bug fixes have gone in as well. Try the latest Zoho Projects and we will be glad hearing your feedback as always.
Zoho Projects : RSS Feeds, Language Options and more
Zoho Projects is used around the world and what better way to access it than in your mother tongue! In addition to English, we have added the following language options - French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Czech, Italian, Portuguese (European & Brazilian), Swedish & Russian. More language options will get added in future.
Adminstrators & managers can be up-to-date now, thanks to RSS feeds support. A couple of options available here - RSS at the individual project level and at the account level (combined feed for all projects). The feeds are HTTP authenticated and so use a RSS feed reader which supports authenticated feeds.
In addition to the already available ‘Duration’ of Tasks, you now have the option to specify the ‘End Date’ for each of your Tasks.
Test drive the latest Zoho Projects for all your project management needs.
Zoho Projects : Create Docs/Spreadsheets & Embed HTML Code Snippets
Recently, Zoho Projects got closely integrated with Zoho Writer, Sheet & Show. Extending this integration further, you can now create from within Zoho Projects a ‘New Document’ or a ‘New Spreadsheet’ using Zoho Writer and Sheet respectively.
And in Zoho Projects’ “Forums”, you can now embed <iframe> and <object> HTML tags. Makes it easier for embedding a spreadsheet from Zoho Sheet or videos from YouTube.
Test drive the new features in Zoho Projects and do let us know your feedback.
Zoho Projects : Closer Integration with Writer/Sheet/Show and more
Zoho Projects’ latest update has a few functionalities that you will love. The project files (typically doc, xls, ppt) that you have centrally loaded to the ‘Documents’ section of Zoho Projects are now viewable in Writer/Sheet/Show. No need to download and view them on a desktop based app. And it gets better. When you open & edit a doc/xls file in Writer/Sheet and save the changes, it automatically gets reflected in the Zoho Projects ‘Documents’ section as a new version! An example of how the option looks like below :
The other major area we’d concentrated on this update is that of logging time & how you see your work calendar. You can now have a consolidated calendar view of all your projects (under ‘My Home’ -> ‘My work calendar’). And there are filtered views too - By User, By Project, By Tasks, By Milestones etc.
The ‘work calendar’ also has the iCal subscription option at the bottom. You can subscribe to this HTTP Authenicated feed in your iCalendar and get automatic updates when new tasks get added to your projects, for example.
With the ‘log calendar’ view, you can now see the total logged time of a user across projects.
And Zoho Projects now allows consolidated export of the logged hours timesheet for each user across Projects as a xls/csv file.
Generic tasks assigned to ‘Any User’ can now be logged by the user(s) who’d done them.
Other than the above, the UI of the ‘Forums’ section has been improved as well. Try the latest Zoho Projects and we would love hearing your feedback.
Zoho Projects : With More Paid Plans
Earlier we used to have Enterprise plan with unlimited projects @ $80 per month & Express plan with 20 projects @ $20 per month. We received requests asking for plans in between 20 projects & unlimited projects. In order to meet these requirements, we have introduced more paid plans in Zoho Projects. Two new plans ‘Elite’ (100 projects - $55 per month) & ‘Premium’ (50 projects - $35 per month) been added to the list. Disk space for Enterprise plan (unlimited projects) has also been increased from 5 GB to 25 GB at the same cost of $80 per month. Check out the latest pricing plans.
In addition to that, some UI & feature enhancements have been done too. The ‘Meetings’ tab now has sub-tabs - ‘Upcoming Meetings’ & ‘Elapsed Meetings’. From now on, ‘Location’ and ‘Duration’ can be specified for each meeting (click ‘Advanced Options’ in ‘Add/Edit Meeting’ form).
Try the latest Zoho Projects and your feedback will be much appreciated as always!
Zoho Projects : Faster than before
In March 2007, we migrated most of the Zoho services to a new data center with more powerful servers. This weekend, Zoho Projects joined the other Zoho apps in the new data center. You should now be experiencing a major boost in the performance of Zoho Projects as the pages load much faster and the data inputs happen more smoothly.
Also, this update had a couple of UI enhancements. The ‘Tasks & Milestones’ tab now has sub-tabs - General, Upcoming, Overdue, Completed - for added clarity. And each Tasklist / Milestone can be Expanded or Collapsed. The ‘Forums’ tab has also undergone a few changes as well.
Try the new & enhanced Zoho Projects and we would be glad hearing your feedback!
Zoho Projects : Cool Overviews
Came across a couple of nice overviews on Zoho Projects. Chris Kasten at Solo Technology is a long-time Zoho fan. He is looking for a project management solution for his company and has started evaluating Zoho Projects first. From his illustrated pictorial overview :
I have a project, I suppose I should have some tasks associated with it. Here it gets more interesting… There’s a variety of ways this tool can be used to manage a project. For the moment, I’ve decided that I’d layout milestones, and then for each milestone I’d define tasks. In my example, I added one task list per milestone (”readiness” tasks) but you could actually have many task lists per milestone — or one or more tasklists not associated with a milestone.
Did I mention this is all “Ajaxy” and fluid? You can see (above) that I’ve defining a task without jumping to interim pages. It’s all live an “in place”.
Tasks can easily be re-ordered and edited.
There’s tons more here. Meetings scheduling, messaging, project reports, forums and who knows what else I missed. I like that the company logo can be added. I’ve not looked at the other candidates yet, but this definitely seems like it’d fit the bill for what we’re after. Performance is good, key features all seem to be there.
Brett & Randy at Circle Six Design blog are happy customers of Zoho Projects and like it very much. From their excellent blog post titled “Project Management with Zoho”
Zoho provides Gantt charts, calendars and timers. It also has file sharing and storage, with the space determined by your payment plan. By the way, Zoho is 100% free for open source projects. You can put tasks on a timeline, along with meetings and major milestones, and then see them in different formats.
There are more features that I didn’t touch here, mostly because I haven’t gotten to exploring every nook and cranny yet. But overall, I’m very impressed, and for most purposes, Zoho is very affordable. If you’re looking at project management solutions, be sure to add this to your list to check out.
Thanks for the nice overviews Chris, Brett & Randy
PodTech: Zoho, disruptor of Microsoft Office?
Earlier this month Sridhar Vembu and I had a brief discussion with Robert Scoble on various Zoho related topics. Scoble posted these videos (Discussion with Sridhar and Notebook Demo) in PodTech. Also, check out his blog post ‘Zoho: the office disrupters‘. Below are the videos.
Recent blogs posts on Zoho
Gili at ‘Blogging for business’ has a nice post titled “A realistic valuation model for blogging ventures” which is about calculating the net worth of a blog. The blog evaluation calculator there is on Zoho Sheet. If you have a regular blog, do give the blog evaluation calculator a try.
John Wilson confesses to being a big Zoho fan (thanks, John!) and has a nice post of his first experience with Zoho Meeting. From his blog post,
Today, whilst chatting to someone on Skype, I decided it would be helpful to walk them through a website application. I was able to quickly launch Zoho Meeting, ping them an email invite containing a link and within 2 minutes from initiating the entire process, my counterpart was able to view my onscreen activities without having to worry about installs on their machine.
Another long-time Zoho fan, Craig Cmehil has a full review on Zoho Meeting as well.
Talking of Zoho fans, here’s a Chinese blogger named Wangtam who has got lots of posts involving Zoho! Benoit Descary (being French) took note of Zoho Sheet going multilingual.
And this is from a Tumbler blog, “can’t believe I missed these brilliant applications” [referring to Zoho Projects and Zoho Creator]. The same blog makes a reference to one Mr James Clay who had referred to a list of Top 25 Web 2.0 tools for schools. Probably it is this article from March 2007 in OEDb (Online Education Database) which recommends many of the Zoho apps. Elmer Thomas Jr. writing about Office 2.0 tools recommends Zoho Projects & Zoho CRM as well.
Zoho Projects adds more configuration options
Zoho Projects being used all over the world, our users are a very varied lot. To suit them all, the latest Zoho Projects update introduced quite a few configuration options. The encoding of the mails being sent can now be configured to suit our users’ languages. And the time/date format can be chosen to suit different notations being followed in different parts of the world - am/pm or the 24 hour style for time and dd/mm/yy, mm/dd/yy and other options for date.
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The ‘Powered by Zoho’ logo at the bottom has been made customizable. And it can be linked to the company web address that you provide. Another change is that the users’ First/Last names will be displayed everywhere instead of the email ID.
‘Completed Tasks’ can now be shown or made hidden as need be. And ‘Notes’ of ‘Completed Tasks’ are now made viewable. There were a few bug fixes as well in Gantt charts, ‘My Home’ page and document versioning modules.
Test drive the latest Zoho Projects and your feedback will be much appreciated!
Zoho Projects Update : Additional responsibility for Managers & more
A limited functionality in Zoho Projects that many of our users have been pointing out : Only the Administrator (the one who sets up the Zoho Projects account) can add new Projects. With the latest update, Managers can add projects too.
The ‘My Home’ page of Zoho Projects added a few niceties. The Administrator and the Managers can now view it based on any other user (to get a bird’s eye view of what an Employee’s project calendar looks like). Task notes can be seen on mouse-over of the ‘Notes’ icon and the task timer can now be updated from the ‘My Home’ page itself.
A task can now be easily copied (upto 6 copies). Documents uploaded can be seen in a list view or a thumbnail view. And the images can be previewed before downloading. Recent forum comments have been made viewable at the right panel of the forums page. Search on files uploaded can now be performed based on tags as well as file extensions (eg., typing .doc will get you all .doc files)
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The new features as a Zoho Show slide show above.
Blogs on Zoho Projects and CRM
Doug Caldwell has this to say about Zoho Projects :
I have not had the need or even aware there was this sort of free application available until recently. Once I learned the hierarchy between milestones, task list , and tasks it was very straight forward.
And CRM Blogger writes about Zoho CRM :
For those of you who are looking for a cost-effective online CRM solution, I’d like to introduce Zoho CRM. It’s a powerful on-demand CRM system that is very comparable to salesforce.com without the large price tag.
Thanks!
Zoho Projects Update : Easy tasklist duplication and more
Some cool features that you users had been asking for got added in the latest Zoho Projects update done yesterday.
- If you have the same list of tasks to be duplicated across Milestones/Projects, ‘Task List Template’ is for you. You can create a new template from scratch (click on ‘Settings’ -> ‘Templates’) or make an existing tasklist as a ‘Template Task List’.
- You can now send private messages to a selected few members of your Projects account. Click on Users -> Send Message (previously, you can only send / not send messages for all members in a project about Meetings & Forum posts)
- Archived tasks can now be exported (previously only Pending & Closed tasks could only be exported)
- While posting to the forum, the attachments will be sent along with the notification mail. Also, while replying to a forum post, you have the choice to notify all the users or the owner alone.
- Project details are displayed when you mouse over a project’s name in the left panel. Likewise, the notes added to a task get displayed on mouseover too.
Other than the above, a few bug fixes got in as well.
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Try the new Zoho Projects and please do share your thoughts.
Zoho in PC World’s 101 Fantastic Freebies
PC World released a list of ‘101 Fantastic Freebies‘ breaking them into 23 categories. Under ‘Office Productivity in Software and Services’ category, Zoho is listed as a winner. Other freebies in this category includes Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Ajax13, OpenOffice etc. Thanks PC World. We are glad you see the value.
Also, recently Online Education Database created a list for ‘Top 25 Web 2.0 Apps to Improve a Student’s or Professor’s Productivity‘ where Zoho Projects and Zoho Creator were selected and several other Zoho Applications also available as alternatives.
Zoho Projects : Export your project data as csv/xls and more
The latest Zoho Projects update brings in a couple of very useful features. We have been getting feedback of how useful it would be for our users to regularly backup their data. So, here it is - you can now export your ‘Tasks & Milestones’ and ‘Timesheets’ data in xls and csv formats whenever you want. Just click on the ‘Export’ button available in the ‘Tasks & Milestones’/'Timesheet’ tabs and you can save your data offline.
The above features as a Zoho Show slide show below.
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If you closely watch the slides, you will also notice that the tasks now have various color codes depending upon priority.
Tell us what you think of this Zoho Projects update and what more features you would like to have in Zoho Projects.
Zoho Projects Update : Performance tuning and printing
Zoho Projects had an update yesterday and the focus was on performance. You should find Zoho Projects much faster than before. We are working further on the performance front and you should be seeing much more improvement over the next few weeks.
Print functionality has now been added. You can use your browser’s ‘Print’ menu and print any of your Zoho Projects pages. The update also fixed a few bugs.
Adding Users in Zoho Projects
Typically, you are a person in the managerial capacity and have set up an account at Zoho Projects. Then you have added details (tasks, tasklists, milestones etc) about the current project(s) that your company/firm is handling to your Zoho Projects account. Today’s tip is for those who have difficulty in adding users to each such project.
Login to your Zoho Projects account. You can either use the “New User” link at the left-bottom or go to “Settings” -> “People View” for adding new users. You can add a user as a client too - in case you are doing a project for a client and you want to involve him/her in your project proceedings - by clicking on “Settings” -> “Client View” -> “Add Client”.
The users you added will be receiving an email about you adding them up and a random generated password. They can visit http://projects.zoho.com, type their email ID for user name and the password they got for logging in. They will see the projects and project details you have created. (the password can be changed by visiting Settings -> General Settings -> Change Password)
In case they don’t receive the email (the email could have wrongly landed in spam/bulk folders etc), please ask them to follow the below steps :
# Visit http://projects.zoho.com
# Click on the ‘Forgot Password’ link there.
# Type his/her email ID (the same email ID that you used to add him/her as a user) as the login name and click on the ‘Submit’ button.
# The user will receive an email with a HTML link in it. Clicking on the link the user will be taken to a page where they can choose a new password.
# Using his/her email ID and the newly chosen password, the user can login at http://projects.zoho.com
Was the above tip useful?
Zoho Projects Update
Zoho Projects had an important update just now. Three most wanted features requested by you users are part of this update.
You can now attach notes to individual tasks. This brings in greater flexibility/benefit as you can now add description/comments for a task, keep track of task completion etc.
Administrators are now allowed to clear projects and start them afresh. This is an improvement over the past implementation where a project can only be archived. The new implementation will allow users a choice - either to archive their projects for later reference or delete old project data in one go This addresses user concerns of a simple delete option at the project level not being available in Zoho Projects before (hey Marty, this one is for you especially 
).
One oft heard feedback from users was that meetings can’t be set as recurring in Zoho Projects. Not anymore. Users can now schedule recurring meetings every day, week, month or year.
Other than the above, the current update includes the following features too - Users can now update their job title and contact details like mobile/phone number etc. Other than archiving projects, completed milestones can now be archived too to avoid clutter. And whenever a forum post is being typed, the user can see a preview of it at the bottom. Performance tweaks have also been done on select operations.
Try out the latest in Zoho Projects and have your say in the comments below or write to us at feedback(at)zohoprojects(dot)com.
Zoho Projects Update
An update to Zoho Projects happened a few minutes ago. Some cool features that many of you have been asking for are available now. Zoho Projects, like Zoho Writer and Zoho Planner, now offers different colored skins to choose from. Choose the one you like.
Mac users rejoice. Zoho Projects now supports Safari! Opera too is now supported as Zoho Projects takes the tally of supported browsers to 4 (the other two being the obvious ones - Firefox & IE). Other useful features include : Timesheet log hours can be added/edited, forums posts can now be edited/deleted and can have attachments as well. A few issues have been fixed as well.
Update : Another important feature available now - you can now see both the Internal/External Milestones in a single page.
Zoho Projects goes out of Beta!
Zoho Projects had an update minutes earlier. With this update, it joins Zoho CRM as the second Zoho service to move out of Beta. Salient points of the release include :
# You can now have multiple projects by signing-up for premium plans. The one project free version continues to be there
# Zoho Projects will completely be free for Open Source projects
# Zoho Projects now has a secure connection through SSL
# Zoho Projects now provides Unicode (UTF-8 character set) support allowing international users to type in their language.
Check out the new Zoho Projects. For more on premium plans click here.
Important Note about Zoho Projects Beta
The current free version of Zoho Projects Beta allows adding of a single project only. We are coming up with paid versions soon which will allow adding of more projects. Kindly bear with us till then.
Zoho Projects video by Robin Good
Robin Good at MasterNewMedia has come with something that took us all by complete surprise. While we released the screencast of Zoho Projects yesterday, we were hard pressed for time. So it was just a recording of the mouse movements & screen changes & the screencast was a silent one.
Robin had taken the screencast, had given a very good voice over & mixed some mild background music too. I doubt if it would have come out that great if we had done it. A Web 2.0 mash up in its own right, I should say.
See Robin’s Zoho Projects video on YouTube. And his article “Project Management Online: Zoho Projects Goes Live - Video Introduction” in MasterNewMedia.
Thanks a lot, Robin!
