Announcing Zoho Projects for Google Apps

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!

This sounds fantastic - I love ZoHo and use Google apps and I think you're on the right track here for some great stuff. What you didn't cover was how to connect current projects to Google apps. Is there a way to add these new features to an existing project or user login? Thank you, brad

@brad Thank you for your comment. For your query kindly do refer ZOHO SSO FAQ section "8. How do I link my existing Zoho account to Google/ Google Apps/ Yahoo! account?" @ http://zohosso.wiki.zoho.com/Zoho-SSO-Help.html#gy8

Hi, Please check the below link which explains how to connect your existing Zoho Projects with Google Apps. How do I link my existing Zoho account to Google/ Google Apps/ Yahoo! account? http://zohosso.wiki.zoho.com/Zoho-SSO-Help.html#gy8 Hope this helps.

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?

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