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 ?

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.

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

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.