Zoho Projects

Overview

Our powerful projects and collaboration software consists of four base modules, which are available in each package—as well as the free version. The modules included in Zoho Projects are Tasks and Milestones, Documents, Project Calendars, and Meetings and Forums. All of them are part of the off-the-shelf capabilities of this application. As requirements scale up and needs intensify, the add-on modules of Bug Tracker, Time Tracking and Billing, Wiki, and Chat can be added without problems to the application to provide an economical solution for smaller businesses.

Tasks and Milestones: This module provides task management, project milestones, task dependency views, and reporting on any function. Gantt charts and stats of tasks—whether new, partially completed, or closed—are reported in this module.

Document Management: This module allows you to create new documents, presentations, and spreadsheets using Zoho Office Suite and store within the software itself. There is no the need for additional software. The document management functionality allows for many types of files to be uploaded. Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, OpenOffice, StarOffice, AutoCAD, Photoshop, and ZIP files are all compatible. You can import them into Projects and attach them to current projects.

Project Calendars and Meetings: This module organizes meetings, events, and appointments with a browser from your desktop. Project calendars can be shared, you can send automatic reminders, and calendars are accessible from anywhere and for any user of the project.

Project Forums: Collaboration is one of the main components of PM. With this module, interactive message boards can be leveraged so that scattered project teams can collaborate, with information accessible to anyone in the team.

Time Tracking and Billing (available in higher paid plans)): This module features useful time tracking functionalities and associates timesheets, enabling billing functions. Timesheets are exportable to Zoho Sheets and even to an Excel spreadsheet. When executing a project using Zoho Projects, the Time Sheets functionality capturing project billing requirements can be exported to the Zoho Billing application. Create invoices from the timesheets and send them to various payroll and invoicing systems.

Wiki (optional add-on module): This module offers a team intranet collaboration area for adding, sharing, and creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and videos, all of which can all be managed in one place. This forms a repository for one source of project tracking.

Bug Tracker (optional add-on module): This module allows you to report tracking and fixing bugs as well as the configuration of workflows, and permissions for bug submission and status changes — a nice feature not usually included in PM software. The bug-tracking module is more often used internally as an incident tracker within a project.

Chat (optional add-on module): A real-time chat room built for team and project collaboration that is executed from the browser and offers an archiving feature. This module is very useful for white boarding and brainstorming throughout a project life cycle. The chat module can capture several conversations occurring among different work teams.

Benefits

Zoho Projects is a good fit for small enterprises without a PMO or certified PMPs on staff. Its application provides a common sense approach to creating projects, tasks, scheduling, planning, and collaboration in order to complete a project. This application enables organizations to manage projects without hassle, thus lowering administrative costs. For smaller organizations, excess features that can clutter or confuse and extend the learning curve are not present here. The interface is quite intuitive, and users can customize their own interface by using WSIWYG configuration options. Overall, Zoho Projects is a good small business tool that offers PM capabilities without a steep learning curve. By providing the correct PM tools, Zoho Projects enables organizations to complete their projects.