We've been working hard to find new ways to improve the user experience which in turn helps you to improve your productivity. Even in these days of collaboration, we find that many people tend to fall back on email rather than shared online work spaces. And this being the most popular demand from most of our users we've included this feature as part of our recent update.
Let's see what's in store for you :
Post Comments in Forums with Attachments
There may be an interesting topic going around in the
project forums and you may wish to quickly post a comment. Previously,
you had to login to Zoho Projects and then post a comment. But now you can
simply do so through an email.
Add Task Notes with Attachments
We've
provided
a unique email id for each and every task. Go to task details page. Now
copy the email address and compose a mail along with your notes and
send it. You can find your notes automatically added for this task via
email.
Add Notes for Meetings with Attachments
Similarly you can add notes and attach files for a
scheduled meeting through email. Also you can add notes for
an existing meeting through a reply mail.
It's simple, isn't it ? Learn more about the new feature addition at Communicate with Projects via Email
We feel that communicating via email in Zoho Projects will be extremely useful for virtual teams as this encourages
informal communication and team building. It's
not
just about a new feature addition - it's how you thoughtfully
apply it. So find ways for your team to play with it and you'll be amazed at how quickly they find new ways to
apply them to their work process.
We hope you'd start using these features in Zoho Projects and share your experience with us at support@zohoprojects.com
We wanted to let you know about two feature enhancements done during the recent update of Zoho Projects.1. Task Details View
Until recently, in Tasks & Milestones, you needed to dig deep
to add notes, log hours or associate documents to a task. If you have a task for which you may need to frequently do these operations, then it makes sense to have all these options accessible easily. Hence we've introduced the Task Details page where you can
add
notes, associate docs, log time for a task - all from a single
place.
To view the task details page :
1. Go to Tasks and Milestones tab
2. Click on the particular task to display the task details page
Here's a sample screenshot:
Apart from this, you can also set status, priority, percentage completed for a task. You can also take a print out of the entire task details page.
Now, you can see overdue milestones of your project from two different places2. Overdue Milestones View
b. From Project Dashboard
As you may know, we
have APIs for many of Zoho's services. And we have a good many services
implementing our APIs. This allows both Zoho's and our API partner's customers to be mutually benefited. A sample list of API Partners here.
Today,
we're excited to announce the API for Zoho Projects. Developers
can extend the project management and collaboration capabilities through our APIs and can build their own customized applications for their business needs. We've tried to make the API follow the REST (Representational State Transfer) principles and generate a XML/ JSON object which
allows you to access / read / write Zoho Projects data from third-party
systems like Google/Yahoo gadgets, web
sites, billing & invoicing systems, other web-based products and do much more.
How can you access and use this API ?
It's simple. To get started with Zoho Projects API,
1. You need to first get the API Key and Ticket ID
2. Fill in the required details mentioned to access your API
http://projects.zoho.com/portal/[portalname]/api/private/[format]/methodname?parameters
where,
portalname your project portal name
methodname is one of the API methods.
parameters are query parameters passed as POST
input.
format is one of the required output formats
(XML/JSON)
For more information about this API, please visit our Zoho Projects API Documentation.
Here goes a sample implementation of Zoho Projects gadget built using Zoho Projects API. The below gadget can be embedded in Facebook, Orkut, iGoogle and Gmail.Stream of latest activities - for all users in a project
This opens up a new chapter for Zoho Projects, and it’s just a start. With the Zoho Projects API, you will be able to build a customized CRM system with Projects, billing systems, document management, time tracking tools and other web-based products. In the coming weeks, we’ll continue to post example uses and implementations for everyone to check out. We hope you will join us to share your ideas, tips and tricks with other developers in the community, through our API forums at Tips and Ideas for API.
As always, we'd love to hear your queries regarding Zoho Projects API at support@zohoprojects.com.
Here is a request from one of our customers:
Hi,
I mentioned this before but is there any chance you can implement this feature:
It's a great function to be able to export a time sheet, but without the total time, it is useless!
Please???! :)
He is not alone there as we had a flood of similar requests from many of our customers. So we've implemented this request in our latest Zoho Projects update. From now on after exporting your timesheet data into xls/csv format, you will be able to see total log hours of your project.
We are also very much excited to announce few enhancements which we felt would be quite handy for you while using Zoho Projects.
1. Upload xlsx files in Documents
Some users who are working on latest xlsx files would like to upload these files and collaborate in Zoho Projects. The current update includes support for .xlsx file format.
2. Show Task List & Task Owner in Task Dependency View
A Task Dependency view basically is a hierarchy tree structure of parent-child tasks but missed details like which task list a task belonged to and who the task's owner was. We felt these might be useful information to show for dependent tasks view. Here's how the Task Dependency View looks like now.
3. All Task Lists View
Above all, the much awaited "All Task Lists" option got implemented in this update. Just click on the Tasks and Milestones tab and all task lists present across milestones of your project will get listed in a single place.
Click on the More Task Lists link to list down all task lists in All Task Lists view. You can also take a print out of all your task lists.
Check out the new features and send us your valuable suggestions to support@zohoprojects.com.
TJ McCue has a review of Zoho Projects at the Small Business Trends blog. The review should be helpful for small businesses, start-ups looking for a project management tool. Excerpts:
If you have been seeking an affordable project management solution, Zoho Projects is one to consider. It is software-as-a-service, meaning you can sign up instantly and there is nothing to download. Pricing starts at free for one project, with varying price levels up to $80/month for unlimited users/projects.
Keep in mind that Zoho offers an entire suite of tools including Zoho CRM, Zoho Invoice, and so forth, so you can tie these tools together if you find you like one of them and need more.
The main dashboard, like most SaaS services, centers on what’s happening in your universe. So, all of the updates that people made to a project are summarized here. All of the milestones and tasks are right there for you to see.
The one item I liked best about this meta view is the Search box. Without being technically in my project, I could search and pull up all the references to that project and save myself the time of going to that specific project if all I wanted to see was the top 2-3 items from it.
For the busy small business owner or manager who is probably working from a tight timeline and small budget, Zoho Projects is an intuitive, easy-to-use project manager tool.
Thanks to TJ McCue for the nice review.
UPDATE : Bill Ives at 'The AppGap' has a good review on Zoho Projects 2.0 too.
This post is a combination of one feature which many of you seem tough to find/do in Zoho Projects and two new features. First the tough-to-find/do feature.
Add/View Task Notes
Often
we get this support question of how one can add notes to a task.
Here's how to do it. In the Task & Milestones tab, go to the task where you want to add your notes & click on the gray Notes icon.
This will pop up a notes dialog box where you can type in your notes related to the task and save the changes.
You can in fact add multiple notes to a task. To view the task notes added, click on the yellow colored icon which indicates that one or more notes have already been added to a task.
Log Time from My Timesheet
One
popular demand from most of our users is there should be an option
to log time directly from My Timesheet itself instead of going to each Timesheet tab across various projects to log their billable / non-billable hours. So
we've made this available in the My Timesheet itself.
View Unread Chat Topics
Few
customers felt while they are offline or away, they missed important
chat transcripts and there should be an option to see missed
conversations with their project members and clients. Now you can check such missed chat transcripts and you can do this from 3 different places in Zoho Projects.
a) from the Home tab
b) From the Dashboard View
c) Of course from the Chat tab
Hope you find these features helpful. We'd
like to hear from you about these features in Zoho Projects and how
it is helping you and your team 
Zoho, the upstart provider of online Web applications, seems to be continually integrating and upgrading its products in the cloud, says China Martens, an analyst with The 451 Group. Martens jokes that it's as if all of the Zoho developers sit in separate rooms for several months, each one pounding away at his respective application (Zoho Mail, for example, or Zoho CRM), only to have the walls come tumbling down just as the developers are ready to join their applications.
Unveiled at the start of July, the 2.0 release of Zoho Projects, the collaboration and productivity platform, reflects multiple integration efforts, as well as the following improvements:
- Twitter-like status bars enable project members to be more social within the application.
- Project-member activities are presented in a project stream, which is a visual representation of project activities.
- The integration of Zoho Chat and the enablement of group chat, through which project members can add tasks, assign them out, and even attach documents to them. Members can also move beyond Chat to create a discussion forum.
- An expansion of the user interface to allow project members to bring in external information, write notes on documents, and assign documents to a particular task.
- The ability to create a wiki for centralizing information, eliminating the need to import an outside Zoho Doc.
- The addition of a timesheet, integrated with Zoho Invoice, to log and track time spent on specific tasks, and to easily create, send, and track invoices.
Zoho also made some significant enhancements to its Zoho CRM product recently. With the Zoho CRM Mail Add-on, officially announced on July 21, Zoho CRM now integrates with email -- and not just Zoho Mail. The selection of any email account for integration will add an "email" tab to the Zoho CRM application. Users running off a non-Zoho email client can configure Zoho Mail to be the interface for sending and receiving. According to the company, the most significant element of the integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Mail is that the contact information involved in each email is automatically added to the Zoho CRM system, where a user can see all of the correspondence with a particular contact. Users can respond to email from within the CRM system, or even add tasks to a given contact.
We had an awesome
reception for the Zoho Projects 2.0 launch. Thanks to all of you for the overwhelming response! Based on your feedback, we have done a few enhancements.
Previously, tasks displayed in the 'My Home' tab didn't have the Tasklist & Milestone info associated with them. Not knowing which Milestone or Tasklist a task belongs to made it tough on our users' part. This has now been made easier. Now we show the tasklist, the milestone and the project that each task belongs to.
Many of you pointed out that the user name info that was being displayed in
the Dashboard tab was not properly wrapped. The user name display has now been corrected.
It was possible to create new projects only from "My Home". To make things easier, a "New Project"
link has been added in the project switch dropdown too.
In addition to the above, we have done a couple of bug fixes and fixed a few UI glitches too. Check out the updated Zoho Projects @ http://projects.zoho.com.
A customer from Poland recently e-mailed our Zoho Projects support team with two questions:
The first question is easy and short: all of Zoho Projects versions (including the Free one) include an unlimited number of users.
I would like to ask you how many people can collaborate on free and upper price versions and second but most important question: How does Zoho Projects support agile and short iterations project development
The answer to the second one is also short. Zoho Projects supports Agile development very well. But it warrants some further explanation.
The first item the Agile methodology manifesto is to put "Individuals & interactions over processes & tools". No young and growing company likes processes, but we all love our tools. (For those people not familiar with the Agile methodology, it's basically a set of principles about how teams working on a software product go about creating that product.)
In fact, we argue that the right tools can in fact put "individuals and interactions" front and center. And that's exactly what the newly-released Zoho Projects 2.0 is for. It allows teams to collaborate and work in quick iterations to get their work done.
Take for example the following three scenarios:
1. Embedded (and included in the price) group chat room helps your team make decisions faster. While Agile emphasizes face-to-face interactions, sometimes that's not possible. In the case of Zoho, we have a distributed company, with most of the product and marketing activities happening between US, India and Japan. Even when your projects team is local, your customer might not. Zoho Projects also allows you to set both "internal" and "external" (i.e. customer) users, so you can set different levels of access for each.
2. The Project Stream and the Twitter-like status updates gives you a quick update on everything happening in the project. With Agile, milestones and task due dates are not set in stone - they are always changing. Zoho Projects helps you keep your team appraised as there are changes in the schedules and plans.
3. Older software development methodologies argued for "requirements" to be set in stone and pretty much frozen before the first line of code was written. In contrast, Agile calls for flexibility around deadlines and when requirements come int. Zoho Project's included project Wiki is an ideal place where the entire team can keep track of the changing requirements. And of course, not only that, you can also go back and track how the requirements have changed over time using version control.
I hope that addresses the question. This is just a subset of the things you can do with Zoho Projects 2.0, but we found them to be the most relevant for an agile methodology. Of course, Zoho Projects also has the traditional milestones - task - priorities functionality that is essential to any structured project.
Rodrigo
Visit : http://projects.zoho.com
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