• 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
  

• 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.
  

• 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).

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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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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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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Let's see the possibilities that Zoho's project management application offers when working with tasks.

1. 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
2. You can choose to Send Mail Notification whenever a new task is created, gets assigned
3. In the real world, most tasks are accomplished through team work. Zoho Projects allows you to associate a task to multiple team members
4. 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
5. You can set the priority of each task as High, Medium, Low or None
6. 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.

We get this question quite often -

Does Zoho offer a backup function which will let me download all my data?

We have various options depending on each Zoho service.

Zoho Writer : Offers a variety of different formats that you can export a document to - doc, docx, pdf, odf (odt), latex, sxw, html, rtf & txt. Click on Export to see the options.

Also integrates with Google Gears. Offers upto 50 documents to be downloaded to your desktop. You can access these documents from http://writer.zoho.com/offline. Click on Go Offline to download Google Gears and your Zoho Writer documents

Zoho Sheet : Click on Export. Again offers a wide variety of options from xls to pdf to ods to xml. There is also a batch export option available from the sidebar.

Zoho Show : Open a presentation. Click on Export and you will see the options available (ppt, pdf, pps and odp)

Zoho Projects : Export all your tasks as an xls or csv file. Under Tasks and Milestones, click on Export button

Zoho Creator : Export all your data as xls, pdf. Also as RSS, JSON feeds etc.

Zoho Wiki : You can download all the pages of your Wiki as a zip file. Available under Settings -> Click to download the backup

Zoho CRM : Choose the module (Leads, Contacts etc) and click on Export. You can also export all your CRM data in one go also. We charge a nominal fee of $10.

Zoho DB & Reports : Export your reports as csv, pdf or an image file

Zoho Invoice : Export each invoice, estimate as pdf. Export customer's info as VCard (vcf).

Zoho Notebook : Has an Export as mht option. The exported page can be viewed in Internet Explorer.

We will be coming up with more export options in upcoming updates.