Zoho Projects | Zoho Blogs

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.

Some time ago, a Zoho Projects customer from Australia -who happens to use Google Apps as his e-mail solution- wanted us to provide an integration between Zoho Projects and Google Apps so that he could use both seamlessly. His main concern was that his employees use Google Apps everyday for email and intranet information, so he wanted to have the Zoho Projects information easily accessible there.

After checking with other customers, that seemed like a good scenario for us to implement, but at the same time we were busy giving our users a better way to organize their projects and making project management more social with Zoho Projects 2.0. But even the core Zoho Projects team was busy, our IAM (Identity Access Management) team who is responsible for Single Sign On within Zoho & other federated logins took this up - and provided our support for signing-in with a Google Apps account. This really made creating Zoho Projects for Google Apps a lot easier. That is one reason why having small teams distributed works better than having one central team.

Ok, so what is the integration with Google Apps you are talking about
Zoho Projects for Google Apps allows customers to enjoy the functionality of Zoho Projects while at the same time having an integrated experience with their Google Apps account. Currently, Zoho Projects for Google Apps includes:

Single Sign-on with Google Apps
Customers can now login to Zoho Projects with the same username and password they use for Google Apps - no need to keep track of a separate account.

Upload documents from Google Docs
Upload Google Docs documents to your project in Zoho Projects. This way your documents stored in Google Docs can be shared with all the members in your project. Of course, you can still continue to attach documents from Zoho Docs and directly from your personal desktop.

View your project milestones in Google Calendar
Keeping track of your projects milestones is now even easier. You can have your milestones, tasks and meetings from your Zoho Projects appear automatically on your Google Calendar.

Get Zoho Projects inside Gmail, iGoogle and Google Sites
Finally, you can also get your Project Stream (the latest activity happening around your project) inside iGoogle or a Google Sites page by embedding the Zoho Projects gadget. This makes the whole experience smooth - Zoho Projects updates come to you.

How easy is it to use Zoho Projects into Google Apps ?

Short version: it's dead easy.
Long version: Here is a short video which explains the different possibilities for Google Apps customers to manage their project in Zoho Projects - all it takes is to login with our Google Apps credentials and off you go.

This is just the beginning of this integration - users like you will surely come up with new integration scenarios that we should throw in here. We keep our ears wide open to listen to our customers and improve our products accordingly. So please pour your ideas on making this even better.

Wait... are you still competing with Google Apps?

Sure! The Zoho suite of services now comprises more than 20 different Software-as-a-Service products. Some of them are bound to overlap with other someone's products. So yeah, 4 of them do overlap with products included in Google Apps. And we continue to compete in that arena (for the record, we do think ours are better, and other people seem to agree - check the recent award from Infoworld). Some people might call it coopetition. Anyway - in the end, customers and their needs come first - and we have a track record of allowing other competitors to integrate with our products, so we do the same. And of course, our goal is to reach as many customers as possible and offer then great products at affordable prices.

Other similar products from Zoho will come to Google Apps customers in the future. Stay tuned!

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

The spate of recent announcements from us like Zoho Projects 2.0, Zoho CRM+Mail Integration & the Zwitch program got noticed by Lauren McKay of destinationCRM.com. From her article titled, 'Are You Ready to Zwitch to Zoho?',

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.

Read the nice article in full here. Thanks to Lauren and destinationCRM.

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:

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 first question is easy and short: all of Zoho Projects versions (including the Free one) include an unlimited number of users.

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

Today we're excited to end the 'mystery' and announce Zoho Projects 2.0. What is so exciting about this launch? It will change how teams get work done.

Remember the days when teams had their documents in a share, their discussions through mail in some ancient mailing-list software, the project plan in Microsoft Project, any relevant content on the company's intranet, and chatted with people on the team using a variety of IM clients? What happened when you needed to find something? What about when someone new just joined the team and needed to 'ramp up'? And sure, 'big' announcements always found their way, but what about the stuff that happens on a daily basis - the gears that move the team - how do you keep track of those?

Well, of course you remember those days, because they are actually these days. That's how most people still collaborate today. But no more. Zoho Projects brings all of that together into a single package of teamwork nirvana.

Zoho Projects 2.0 goes beyond the traditional 'project management' space and helps people work together to achieve a common goal. It's not just about tasks, milestones and priorities (but we do that too of course). It's about how people interact and what they need while working on something - whether it's a local team or a distributed team, an internal team, or a customer-facing one. Many times when we hear 'Project' he instantly think of a PMI-certified guy with a huge Gantt chart taped in his office door. But every team is always working in some sort of project, whether that's formally defined or not. And that is where Zoho Projects helps.

So, why 'social'? Social because we realize that getting work done is less about the work or 'the plan', and more about the people that work to make that plan happen - and how they make it happen. The new Project Stream makes it easier for people to stay on top of what's going on with their team and their project. Teams can keep all their relevant documents and files neatly organized in a centralized place. And it's not just about files, but also about the discussions that are going on around the project, or the content (and in these days that means more likely than not web content). And of course also about those IM chats.

Alright, I could go on about this for days. Instead, let me jump to the juicy stuff. Here's what's to love about Zoho Projects 2.0:

Plan your projects

Keep your projects organized: Milestones, Tasks and Tasks Lists
Set-up dependencies, assign ownership, priorities and more
Import MPP files - Plan in Microsoft Project, collaborate in Zoho

Collaborate with your team

The Project Stream keeps you up-to-date about the latest activities going on around your project
Set your User Status to let your team members know what you're working on (you can think of that like a private Twitter for your Project)
Keep all your meetings, milestones and tasks organized in the shared calendar
Store your files and documents in one place, keep track of the changes with the version history
Integration with the award-winning Zoho Office - so you can create/edit/view documents using just your browser
Discussions - interactive forums make everyone a part of the conversation - and keep important topics and decisions available for everyone to see
Create team and project web pages with the integrated Wiki
My personal favorite - the always-on, embedded chat means you can chat with your entire team - or with only one person using just your browser. And it also keeps a log of what's been said so you can refer back to past conversation. And you can also setup different 'chat rooms' - one for every topic you're discussing.

Track your progress

The Project Dashboard offers a quick at-a-glance view of upcoming tasks and milestones, meetings and whatever has been happening around your projects.
Reports visually represent your team progress against your pre-defined goals
And finally, for those teams with external customers, the Timesheet makes it easy to log and track who has spent how much time doing what. But it doesn't stop there, you can automatically generate and send the invoice using Zoho Invoice (or export the data to use any other invoicing medium that suits you).

If you want to see more of Zoho Projects in action before you sign up, below is a ~3 min video with a good overview. You can also view the screenshot tour we have prepared for you.

We are sure that after trying Zoho Projects for a month you will wonder how your team ever got stuff done without it. We actually used Zoho Projects 2.0 while building Zoho Projects 2.0 and it proved invaluable - we'll have more about that later.

Rodrigo

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.

Announcing the Zoho Projects API

How can you access and use this API ?

Stream of latest activities - for all users in a project

Announcing Zoho Projects for Google Apps

Ok, so what is the integration with Google Apps you are talking about

How easy is it to use Zoho Projects into Google Apps ?

Wait... are you still competing with Google Apps?

Zoho Projects : All Task Lists View and Few Enhancements

SmallBizTrends blog review of Zoho Projects

Zoho Projects : Add Task Notes, Log Time from My Timesheet, View Unread Chat Topics

Lauren McKay in destinationCRM about Zoho

A Few Usability Enhancements to Zoho Projects 2.0

Agile Development with Projects 2.0

Announcing The Social Way To Get Things Done: Zoho Projects 2.0

Zoho Projects How-To: Using the 'Client' user role

How can you access and use this API ?

Stream of latest activities - for all users in a project

Ok, so what is the integration with Google Apps you are talking about

How easy is it to use Zoho Projects into Google Apps ?

Wait... are you still competing with Google Apps?

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