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.

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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.

Popularity: 14% [?]

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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.

Popularity: 14% [?]

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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.

Popularity: 68% [?]

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As a versatile project management tool, Zoho Projects offers quite a few options that can be customized. Let’s see some of those here. All these options are accessible by clicking on the Settings link at the top-right (and the tabs there - General Settings, Company Settings)

• Skins : Not everyone likes the UI of an app to be of the same color. And it depends on your mood too. Choose from 5 different colors
• Set the UI’s language of choice (In fact, this is the primary reason for this blog post - we got a query from a user asking us whether Zoho Projects had a Spanish UI option). Zoho Projects supports 14 different languages
• Another cool option is to set your Company’s logo (instead of the default Zoho Projects one)
• Each user can have his/her information like nick name, phone numbers, photo etc to form a profile of their own
• Change your default password (and for changing it from time to time, for added security)
• Your company’s profile, including address, time zone. And the email encoding you would like to use (Languages like Japanese, Korean etc require encoding other than UTF-8 to be set)
• Time and date format settings : Set how you would like time/date to appear across Zoho Projects screens

Utilize the above options to get the maximum out of Zoho Projects.

Popularity: 21% [?]

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As a project management tool online, Zoho Projects is a nice solution for teams working collaboratively on projects.

A project typically will have a good many files associated with it and what better way than to have them all maintained & managed at a central place. In Zoho Projects, each project has a Documents tab which lists all documents/files uploaded by its project members.

Zoho Projects’ integration with Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet helps a lot too. You can open .doc, files in Zoho Writer and .xls files in Zoho Sheet directly. This eliminates the conventional way of working with Office documents - download them first to your desktop & then opening them using a desktop based software.

And here’s more. Once you open & edit such files in Zoho Writer or Zoho Sheet, you can save them back directly inside Zoho Projects’ Documents module! Add to this, the versioning support that the Documents module of Zoho Projects offers, you have a good, centralized document management system in your hands.

Try Zoho Projects now for your project and document management needs. We would be glad hearing your feedback.

Popularity: 19% [?]

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Curtis Partridge at Small Business Tech blog in a post titled ‘Zoho Portfolio Continue to Grow‘ says,

One company that has been quietly building a stunning collection of applications is Zoho. They now offer an impressive array of software including office applications, invoicing, project management, and customer relationship management, database, and more. They have formed world-wide alliance partnerships around the globe to assist small business with using their products. They seem much more serious than others about developing a cloud computing business beyond the geek crowd.

In the coming weeks, we are going to dig more deeply into each of the Zoho applications and compare functionality with other online-based products.

We are eagerly waiting to hear what you would have to say about Zoho, Curtis!

Looking for a free or affordable project management app? David Glumac from Budapest, Hungary suggests some ‘alternatives to MS Project‘. David writes about Zoho Projects,

The team at Zoho is one of the coolest “Web 2.0” companies out there. Their online office suite includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, CRM, project management, invoicing and other applications. Being web-native, all Zoho applications are operating system independent. It supports creating tasks, ownership, setting deadlines and tracking milestones; working with calendars, Gantt charts, reports, share supporting files—all the cool features expected in a project management package.

Anali at the MCLC Library Tech Talk blog in her ‘Talking Tech Friday - Zoho‘ post does a brief overview of some of the Zoho apps.

 Just to prove that Google doesn’t rule the world, I thought I would do a brief overview of the Zoho suite of online tools.

[Zoho Sheet] looks very much like Excel, and also allows you to import or export .xls files from or to your computer. You can embed sheets into a blog or website, collaborate with others, and use a broader variety of tools than with Google Spreadsheets, including macros. One feature I just noticed here, and is the same for Writer, is you can export in a wide variety of formats, including .xls, xml, html, pdf, open office, etc. Very handy!

The [Zoho] wiki uses a nicer WYSIWYG interface than many wiki or blog editing applications I’ve seen. No silly wiki text markup (the bane of my existence), and it looks nicer to me than the PB Wiki design. However, the wiki allows you to choose your own editor, set your own brand and logo, and manage editing and viewing permissions.

Enda Madden at his SaaS Technologies blog says ‘Run your business with Zoho‘.

The last few months I’ve been road testing the Zoho applications by using it for my own company’ day to day administration. Originally Zoho was best known for their meeting application software which was a great substitute for WebEx. Over the last year they’ve constantly added new useful apps and at this stage have almost anything that any SME business would need.

One of my personal favourites is Zoho Invoicing which is a quick and very smart way to generate estimates and invoices http://invoice.zoho.com/login/jsp/login.jsp).

Better still it integrates into Zoho CRM.

Thanks to all the above bloggers!

Popularity: 59% [?]

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One of the most asked for functionalities in Zoho Projects is finally here. Dependency of tasks! And the current update brings in a few more useful features as well. The update in detail :

Task Dependency : You can now set dependency among tasks. A Task can now be made dependent on one or more tasks being completed.

Assigning a Task to Multiple Users : This is another much asked for feature from our customers. Zoho Projects now lets you split & assign a Task among multiple users.

Uniform Date format : Set a date format under ‘Settings’ -> ‘Company Settings’ -> ‘Date/Time Format’. And this format gets reflected throughout the rest of the Zoho Projects UI screens.

Clear Task date : It’s now easy to clear the start or end dates of a Task in case you have decided to reassign dates at a later point of time. Previously, you’d to delete the Task and add it again without dates.

Delete Forum category : This extends the forum post deletion function. Now, entire forum categories can be deleted.

Delete Project : An extension to ‘Clear Project’ that deletes the whole project. Be cautious while using forum & project deletion. The data can’t be retrieved.

Other than the above, a few bugs have been fixed too. Try Zoho Projects & do post your comments below.

Popularity: 47% [?]

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Are you using many of Zoho’s apps and signing in separately to Zoho Projects everytime? Not anymore. Zoho Projects, the easy online tool for project management is now part of Zoho’s single sign-on system. You can now use your Zoho ID (or the email address you used while registering with Zoho) to login to your Zoho Projects account. If you are logging into Zoho Projects for the first time using your Zoho ID, you’ll be asked to choose your domain name.

If you have an account with Zoho Projects alone, you can use the same email address and password to access other Zoho apps now as well. If you face any issues in accessing Zoho Projects, do leave your comment below or write to us at support@zohoprojects.com

Popularity: 25% [?]

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Pai writes about using Zoho Creator and Zoho DB & Reports.

You can now build powerful and sharable databases online for free thanks to websites like Zoho. You don’t even need any special database development experience to create online databases that you can access any time from any browser.

Zoho DB & Reports offers the best “Free” online database service, hands down. It is extremely easy to create your own database and the performance is impressive. The databases run rather quickly which was a pleasant surprise. There doesn’t appear to be any limits in place for the number of databases you can create for free nor how large they can grow so I do not know how many records a Zoho database can contain. You can share any database with anyone you want by simply adding their email address and sending them a link.

Zoho Creator is another database creation service they offer but don’t get them confused. While they describe it as a Database Application builder, it does a lot more than that. Zoho Creator is a lot more complex than Zoho DB so it will not be as easy to use straight out of the gate. It offers an excellent interface builder for creating customized forms for your database application. They now even offer the ability to build database applications for the mobile platform and have their own API for those interested in building more complex databases.

Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily & Rick Broida at BNET Business Hacks recommend Zoho DB & Reports too.

One of the good personal finance blogs that we follow is Ramit Sethi’s. Ramit in a latest post of his embeds Zoho Sheets to show how one can track the money being spent. Joseph (Joe) Kennedy has a nice chart of when to run your home appliances and save on your electricity bills. PGE customers in Portland, please take note. For others, you can prepare a similar chart. Publish it in your blog and it’ll benefit you & your readers. From Joe’s post,

Running at the wrong time of day can cost double or triple what it costs to run in off-peak hours. At current rates, that can add up to a few dollars a month. Granted, it’s not always convenient to do a few loads of laundry after 10pm. But, if you run one load a night, to keep up with the laundry generated, that wouldn’t be so bad.

As an aside, I love zoho.com. Dump Microsoft Office. Zoho is online. It’s free. It lets you save your documents into a format compatible with office. And easily embeds in your blogs. Nearly a dozen other tools, as well.

Ranjan Verma twittered about a Zoho Creator app which will search/compare different mutual funds. Hope we will get to see it in his blog (another one I follow for tips on personal finance & stocks!) soon.

Consulting Pulse writes about the Web 2.0 technologies & programs they use and which of them are worth paying for. About Zoho, they have this to say:

What did I ever do without an online word processor? Just one year ago I was happy wandering along in desktop land with my version of word, then I came across this in an internet search.

Absolutely changed the way I work! Today ALL of my documents are backed up on Zoho, all of my reports are there, I write the first drafts of my posts there and I am starting to use other elements of the service as well. For example, I am dead keen to learn about their project management software and will probably be starting a project there shortly.

If (when?) I ever go into business for myself Zoho will probably be my office productivity suite of choice.

Shameless Reviews (what a name!) on Zoho:

Everyone knows that MS Office XP dents the pocket. Worse with MS Office Vista. You’ll gurgle money to the tune of $300 for a bloated app that tends to require patch after patch. What would you give to have the functionality of MS Office without the price tag? (free) Visit Zoho Office. Don’t worry, you aren’t buying MS Office software online at some discount shop. You’re actually going to word process and spreadsheet your data fully online.

Imagine: now my laptop need to strain and groan under 2GB of bloatware! Once you zoho [Note to Zoli : here's one more person using Zoho as a verb!], there’s no coming back. I know I’m hooked

Thanks to all the bloggers above for using Zoho! Be it a program to monitor your weight, tracking your monthly spend, reducing your electricity charges, investing in the right MF, backing-up your documents / database or managing your projects, remember, Zoho is there to help you out
ps : Site24×7, our website monitoring service is offering a 40% discount till this month end. Head there if you want your website(s) availability monitored round-the-clock.

Popularity: 69% [?]

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