In March 2007, we migrated most of the Zoho services to a new data center with more powerful servers. This weekend, Zoho Projects joined the other Zoho apps in the new data center. You should now be experiencing a major boost in the performance of Zoho Projects as the pages load much faster and the data inputs happen more smoothly.

Also, this update had a couple of UI enhancements. The ‘Tasks & Milestones’ tab now has sub-tabs - General, Upcoming, Overdue, Completed - for added clarity. And each Tasklist / Milestone can be Expanded or Collapsed. The ‘Forums’ tab has also undergone a few changes as well.

Try the new & enhanced Zoho Projects and we would be glad hearing your feedback!

Came across a couple of nice overviews on Zoho Projects. Chris Kasten at Solo Technology is a long-time Zoho fan. He is looking for a project management solution for his company and has started evaluating Zoho Projects first. From his illustrated pictorial overview :

I have a project, I suppose I should have some tasks associated with it. Here it gets more interesting… There’s a variety of ways this tool can be used to manage a project. For the moment, I’ve decided that I’d layout milestones, and then for each milestone I’d define tasks. In my example, I added one task list per milestone (”readiness” tasks) but you could actually have many task lists per milestone — or one or more tasklists not associated with a milestone.

Did I mention this is all “Ajaxy” and fluid? You can see (above) that I’ve defining a task without jumping to interim pages. It’s all live an “in place”.

Tasks can easily be re-ordered and edited.

There’s tons more here. Meetings scheduling, messaging, project reports, forums and who knows what else I missed. I like that the company logo can be added. I’ve not looked at the other candidates yet, but this definitely seems like it’d fit the bill for what we’re after. Performance is good, key features all seem to be there.

Brett & Randy at Circle Six Design blog are happy customers of Zoho Projects and like it very much. From their excellent blog post titled “Project Management with Zoho”

Zoho provides Gantt charts, calendars and timers. It also has file sharing and storage, with the space determined by your payment plan. By the way, Zoho is 100% free for open source projects. You can put tasks on a timeline, along with meetings and major milestones, and then see them in different formats.

There are more features that I didn’t touch here, mostly because I haven’t gotten to exploring every nook and cranny yet. But overall, I’m very impressed, and for most purposes, Zoho is very affordable. If you’re looking at project management solutions, be sure to add this to your list to check out.

Thanks for the nice overviews Chris, Brett & Randy

Earlier this month Sridhar Vembu and I had a brief discussion with Robert Scoble on various Zoho related topics. Scoble posted these videos (Discussion with Sridhar and Notebook Demo) in PodTech. Also, check out his blog post ‘Zoho: the office disrupters‘. Below are the videos.

Gili at ‘Blogging for business’ has a nice post titled “A realistic valuation model for blogging ventures” which is about calculating the net worth of a blog. The blog evaluation calculator there is on Zoho Sheet. If you have a regular blog, do give the blog evaluation calculator a try.

John Wilson confesses to being a big Zoho fan (thanks, John!) and has a nice post of his first experience with Zoho Meeting. From his blog post,

Today, whilst chatting to someone on Skype, I decided it would be helpful to walk them through a website application. I was able to quickly launch Zoho Meeting, ping them an email invite containing a link and within 2 minutes from initiating the entire process, my counterpart was able to view my onscreen activities without having to worry about installs on their machine.

Another long-time Zoho fan, Craig Cmehil has a full review on Zoho Meeting as well.
Talking of Zoho fans, here’s a Chinese blogger named Wangtam who has got lots of posts involving Zoho! Benoit Descary (being French) took note of Zoho Sheet going multilingual.

And this is from a Tumbler blog, “can’t believe I missed these brilliant applications” [referring to Zoho Projects and Zoho Creator]. The same blog makes a reference to one Mr James Clay who had referred to a list of Top 25 Web 2.0 tools for schools. Probably it is this article from March 2007 in OEDb (Online Education Database) which recommends many of the Zoho apps. Elmer Thomas Jr. writing about Office 2.0 tools recommends Zoho Projects & Zoho CRM as well.

Zoho Projects being used all over the world, our users are a very varied lot. To suit them all, the latest Zoho Projects update introduced quite a few configuration options. The encoding of the mails being sent can now be configured to suit our users’ languages. And the time/date format can be chosen to suit different notations being followed in different parts of the world - am/pm or the 24 hour style for time and dd/mm/yy, mm/dd/yy and other options for date.

The ‘Powered by Zoho’ logo at the bottom has been made customizable. And it can be linked to the company web address that you provide. Another change is that the users’ First/Last names will be displayed everywhere instead of the email ID.

‘Completed Tasks’ can now be shown or made hidden as need be. And ‘Notes’ of ‘Completed Tasks’ are now made viewable. There were a few bug fixes as well in Gantt charts, ‘My Home’ page and document versioning modules.

Test drive the latest Zoho Projects and your feedback will be much appreciated!

A limited functionality in Zoho Projects that many of our users have been pointing out : Only the Administrator (the one who sets up the Zoho Projects account) can add new Projects. With the latest update, Managers can add projects too.

The ‘My Home’ page of Zoho Projects added a few niceties. The Administrator and the Managers can now view it based on any other user (to get a bird’s eye view of what an Employee’s project calendar looks like). Task notes can be seen on mouse-over of the ‘Notes’ icon and the task timer can now be updated from the ‘My Home’ page itself.

A task can now be easily copied (upto 6 copies). Documents uploaded can be seen in a list view or a thumbnail view. And the images can be previewed before downloading. Recent forum comments have been made viewable at the right panel of the forums page. Search on files uploaded can now be performed based on tags as well as file extensions (eg., typing .doc will get you all .doc files)

The new features as a Zoho Show slide show above.

Doug Caldwell has this to say about Zoho Projects :

I have not had the need or even aware there was this sort of free application available until recently. Once I learned the hierarchy between milestones, task list , and tasks it was very straight forward.

And CRM Blogger writes about Zoho CRM :

For those of you who are looking for a cost-effective online CRM solution, I’d like to introduce Zoho CRM. It’s a powerful on-demand CRM system that is very comparable to salesforce.com without the large price tag.

Thanks!

Some cool features that you users had been asking for got added in the latest Zoho Projects update done yesterday.

• If you have the same list of tasks to be duplicated across Milestones/Projects, ‘Task List Template’ is for you. You can create a new template from scratch (click on ‘Settings’ -> ‘Templates’) or make an existing tasklist as a ‘Template Task List’.
• You can now send private messages to a selected few members of your Projects account. Click on Users -> Send Message (previously, you can only send / not send messages for all members in a project about Meetings & Forum posts)
• Archived tasks can now be exported (previously only Pending & Closed tasks could only be exported)
• While posting to the forum, the attachments will be sent along with the notification mail. Also, while replying to a forum post, you have the choice to notify all the users or the owner alone.
• Project details are displayed when you mouse over a project’s name in the left panel. Likewise, the notes added to a task get displayed on mouseover too.

Other than the above, a few bug fixes got in as well.

Try the new Zoho Projects and please do share your thoughts.

PC World released a list of ‘101 Fantastic Freebies‘ breaking them into 23 categories. Under ‘Office Productivity in Software and Services’ category, Zoho is listed as a winner. Other freebies in this category includes Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Ajax13, OpenOffice etc. Thanks PC World. We are glad you see the value.

Also, recently Online Education Database created a list for ‘Top 25 Web 2.0 Apps to Improve a Student’s or Professor’s Productivity‘ where Zoho Projects and Zoho Creator were selected and several other Zoho Applications also available as alternatives.

The latest Zoho Projects update brings in a couple of very useful features. We have been getting feedback of how useful it would be for our users to regularly backup their data. So, here it is - you can now export your ‘Tasks & Milestones’ and ‘Timesheets’ data in xls and csv formats whenever you want. Just click on the ‘Export’ button available in the ‘Tasks & Milestones’/'Timesheet’ tabs and you can save your data offline.

The above features as a Zoho Show slide show below.

If you closely watch the slides, you will also notice that the tasks now have various color codes depending upon priority.

Tell us what you think of this Zoho Projects update and what more features you would like to have in Zoho Projects.