Zoho Projects - Pictorial Overview
Posted on June 18, 2007
8 Comments
As I mentioned a few days ago, my company and I have been looking into web based/online Project and Time tracking applications. Tonight I spent some time looking at Zoho Projects to get a feel for what it offers.
What follows is a rather image heavy walk-through to familiarize myself and the folks at the office with it.
To start with, being the cheap evaluator that I am, I signed up for the free “1 project” plan. There’s a nice table that lays out the various plans, features and costs. The key differentiators are the number of plans you can manage and the amount of online file storage. Oh, and SSL support is offered at the higher levels as well. As I said, cheap for me; for the company we’d probably be looking at the Premium or Standard plans to start.
Once a plan is chosen, the registration screen is visited next. Provide your company name, the url you wish to use (yourname.zohoprojects.com) and administrator’s email and password. From there log in and you have arrived.
Of course there were no projects yet, so I created one. Definitely nothing to be confused about here:
I saw document attachments is an option so from there I decided I’d need to attach a “contract” document to my project. Again, very simple:
I was pleased to see that documents can be stored in folders. With more than one project going, tagging would be very welcome (with just my one lonely project tagging isn’t quite as exciting). Once a file is uploaded, it can be updated, moved to a different folder or deleted.
Got a project. Got a document. Let’s add some users next.
Adding users is, yet again, dead simple. Email address and role:
Only 3 roles though? There are a fair number of settings for Zoho Projects, but as far as I can tell, user roles (and their labels) doesn’t appear to be something we can change. Not the end of the world, but something I hope is on the future features list!
Once I added a user (via their email) they received a nice email with a link to the site and pertinent login details.
So far, so good. 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. Unlike the user roles, there is a ton of flexibility here.
This next image shows that I’ve defined two milestones. Under the first milestone I have a couple tasks and am about to save the third task:
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. In the example above, I have the “Advanced Options” turned on for my new task. By default, the new task dialog is pretty basic:
If the “Send Mail Notification” box is checked, an email like this is sent to the Owner (if one is assigned):
—————————————————————–
Company: Solo Technology
Project: Client Integration Project
—————————————————————–
Following task assigned to you by Handy
Task List - Level 1 Readiness tasks
Task Title - Deliver training materials
——————————-
To view the task list, login to
http://xxxx.projects.zoho.com
From here, I logged out and logged back as “chris”, the non-administrator user I had created with a different email address. That user is presented with a dashboard view showing assigned tasks, milestones and scheduled meetings. Here’s a snippet:
While working with tasks, there’s an interesting little feature to start a “task clock”
Circled red above. Click that and the timer starts, indicated by a larger clock icon in front of the task description:
When the larger green clock item is clicked, the task timer stops and the time sheet is automatically updated. Cool!
Otherwise, time sheet entry is a bit more manual but pretty easy to figure out.
Choose the date, the task (tasks is a drop-down with all of your assigned tasks listed) and enter the amount of time. When “Add to Timesheet” is clicked it shows up on the calendar.
That’s just a very cursory overview. 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. I’m curious to see what the folks at work will think about it.
Anyone reading this used it (or currently using it)? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Tags: ajax, productivity, project-management, zoho, zoho-projects
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8 Responses to “Zoho Projects - Pictorial Overview”
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Haven’t tried it with SP3 here. My...
I’ve to say chris that you are one of the Zoho fan like me! Well, zoho projects is equally cool like…other zoho applications. I’m falling in love with each and every zoho application and so far I’ve found them best in the business!
Thanks for the extensive & excellent overview of Zoho Projects, Chris! Eager to hear more feedback as you and your organisation gets to use it.
Mayank @ ReviewSaurus : Thanks
Thanks you for your blog commentary on Zoho projects. I tried a free version for myself to test/evaluate what is offered. It worked for me, but the project manager is not interested in this sort of freeware. She “has to” use the prime contractor’s software application which doesn’t work for the worker bees. She still uses phone and email with attachments to run a world-wide project. How quaint and 20th century. I will be posting a link to your blog on my blog. Thanks.
@ReviewSaurus - hey! Long time no see.
@Arvind - thanks for the mention on the Project blog. If we go this route you can safely assume I’ll be writing more about it
@Doug - Ah, the corporate world. I sure don’t miss it! Phone, email and probably a huge directory full of excel spreadsheets… Silly people. Thanks for the plug on your blog.
@ Arvind : Thanks to you all for providing such cool apps!
@ Chris : Yeah was struggling a lot in between, got sick of rss feeds completely…I’ll be regular face now
It looks like everything is predefined in Zoho. Is it easy to change your project plan in seconds? Right now I’m using Wrike http://www.wrike.com/ and I love its flexibility. I create now own structure and can tag tasks. Does Zoho have it?
Hi Tony. I, personally, think Zoho Projects is really quite flexible. But I imagine that’s an “eye of the beholder” type thing.
There’s a free version, why not just give it a go and see?