Zoho Projects is part of a wider group of web based and hosted applications, the Zoho weboffice suite offered by Zoho/Adventnet Inc. The Opensource arm of the company is currently developing vTiger CRM, a SugarCRM fork that has gone it’s own path.
Zoho Projects is available in five different plans:
- Zoho Project Free Edition: a one project plan that is offered for free, to allow the potential subscriber to test the application
- Zoho Projects Standard Plan: Best suited for small businesses with less than 10 concurrent projects. The cost is 12 USD per month
- Zoho Projects Express & Premium Plan: The mid-range offering, suited for medium businesses that need to run up to 20 to up to 50 concurrent projects with a cost of 20 and 35 USD respectively and,
- Zoho Projects Enterprise Plan: The enterprise-range plan with unlimited concurrent projects, for larger enterprises like universities, banks etc that costs 80 USD per month
All plans support an unlimited number of users. Discounts are offered if you prepay for 1 year. You can see all plans in a greater detail here.
You start by choosing a plan to subscribe to, signing up and creating a zoho account. Alternatively you can log in with your Google or Yahoo account. Once logged in, you have you access to the whole Zoho user space where you can later request free plans for the rest of their applications.
Upon signing up for a new plan, a portal is created (you can choose it’s name) in the form of <username>.projects.zoho.com which is henceforth the location of your projects.
I subscribed to the free edition, for the sake of this review.
Here is a quick functionality overview:
- Tasks and milestones management: As the description implies, here, you can set up the tasks (organized as task lists) that must be completed and the milestones that define critical boundaries in the project. Here, you can also definedependencies between tasks (a task cannot be completed before another completes). Each task can take more than one attachements in the form of notes or documents (see below, in document management) or can be associated with a forum (see below, in forums).
Tasks
- Calendar: This is actually an overview of tasks, milestones and meetings related to the project regardless of users participating (I could see all that as I was actually the admin), in a nicely given web interface where the use of AJAX is more than obvious. This gives a feeling of a “real” application and not just a web-app. In a higher level (or rather an “inside” level), the “My Calendar” application shows all tasks and meetings related to “me” (the logged in user).
- Meeting: under this tab, you can set up meetings with all the project participants including users belonging to the company’s clients (a rather important and useful feature). You set up the time, place and participants list and the application sends reminder emails about the upcoming meeting to all specified participants.
Meeting
- Simple document management: You can upload documents one by one or in bulk and place them in user defined folders. Nothing too spectacular here, except for the option to add a text dodument with Zoho Writer or a spreadsheet with the Zoho Sheet . I don’t know if it is a restriction on the free plan, but I think a similar link to Zoho Notebook should be in place. The doc space per project portal is 100MB. (Update: The free file storage provided for Zoho Projects Free, Standard, Express, Premium and Enterprise Plan is 100 MB, 2GB, 3GB, 5GB and 25 GB respectively).
Documents
- Timesheet: Here, you can specify the hours spent each day on tasks, whether this time is billable, and if there is a charge you can print out an invoice (using of course Zoho Invoice, another application in the Zoho suite). Neat!
Timesheet
- Reports: This tab takes us to a screen where you can have an overview of all tasks and milestones, either in a GANTT chart or a task list, which is realy helpful when you have a lot of tasks with a varying degree of completion. I could not see the dependencies pictured in the chart, which I think is a miss that lowers the functionality and usefulness of the chart. On the other hand, changing a task’s duration, moves any dependent tasks (child tasks) accordingly, and this is something that is reflected in the GANTT chart.
- Forums: Finally, the people working on a project, may participate in a forum set up particularly for that project to discuss various aspects in an open meeting fashion. A useful feature, that has now become a standard of every self-respecting collaboration suite.
All the above are summarized in the projects dashboard where you can quickly have an instant picture of the situation in a certain moment (messages, alerts, upcoming events etc.).
Dashboard
Notifications and a RSS feed for task, milestones etc are also available to every project member. Admins, of course, have some extra privileges for user management, setting up project templates etc.
Our short testing of the application, left us with a positive feeling. We liked the interface that is intuitive, AJAXified and pleasant looking. The occasional light user (a student or a small business owner) will be happy with the free edition that is not crippled in any way while the paid edition will satisfy the professionals.
A few things are not available in Zoho projects:
- Importing projects and tasks: we found no way to import tasks even from a spreadsheet, not to mention Microsoft Project, although you can export most items in a csv or spreadsheet.
- Critical Path Method (or PERT analysis): depending on whether you are looking for compex project management solutions (i.e. for construction or manufacturing) this can be a significant miss.
- Resource Leveling: again a large projects requirement.
The Zoho team has done a good job though on offering the application in different languages. Zoho Projects is available now in 15 languages – Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish.
As a conclusion, I think that Zoho Projects (especially if you combine it with the whole Zoho suite) is rather complete, and although there are minor misses, overall it’s a recommended tool for mainly SMEs that have projects of generic nature. It definetely cannot handle large scale complex projects for construction or manufacturing, but it was not designed for such a purpose in the first place.
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