In a stroke of marketing genius, Zoho has given people one project free so you can really dig in and try out the software, without trial limitations or asking for your credit card. I had initially intended to use Basecamp, which I have used before and like, but they have raised their prices sometime since I last looked at them. Given everything else we have to pay for, it just isn't going to work to pay $24 a month for their least expensive account.
Of all the other project management tools out there, they seemed to be the most appealing to look at and logical in terms of project flow, to start using quickly.
Project-management
software may become key for maintaining your work-at-home status. But
there's no need to shell out $500-plus for high-end software—not when
online project management is easy and inexpensive.
Zoho Projects is one of Zoho's many products: The company makes a full suite
of Web-only software suitable for the office. Any project you or your
boss create can include time tracking, a Gantt bar chart to show
start/finish dates, a calendar, and RSS and iCal support. You can track
the hours you put in as billable or non-billable if necessary. And it
works with multiple administrators—very handy if you've got more than
one supervisor.
For a single project you pay zilch. Once
you've got multiple projects in the pipeline, it costs $5 a month for
the minimum setup (three projects with 500MB of file storage) on up to
$80 a month (unlimited projects with 25GB of storage). That might seem
a bit much for the boss to swallow, but he can put the tool to work not
only for your projects, but for the entire staff as well.
Other options: Newbie Clarizen and the venerable Basecamp track projects with aplomb.
This project management software has a short learning curve, but its ease of use owes mainly to the software’s lack of features. While Zoho Projects features essential project management and collaboration options (like task management, Gantt charts and email integration), it’s short on resource management and budgeting features. Zoho Projects acts more as a glorified to-do list than a full-fledged project management software like our higher-ranked choices.
I love Zoho to bits. Ive told many friends about it, and even the forum
moderators in Zoho. To me, Zoho projects is almost on the brink of
perfection, except for some minor bugs and wishful features I really
want; such as integration with Zoho Calendar (which is nice to drag and
drop), and offline synchronisation of documents. Zoho projects is
Google Docs in a project management suit. It has a wonderful multiple
portals and projects management which allow users to change portals and
projects easily. The calendar features is easy to use and Zoho Write
(MS version of Ms word) and Zoho Sheet (MS version of excel) is very
friendly (:
Documents and spreadsheets and task management: Take a look at Zoho Projects for great office performance. It allows you to keep track of projects for yourself and your team and interact with tasks on the web. Excellent tool for multiple projects.
http://www.zoho.com/ is a services based WEB 2.0 website that has more than 20 applications. I am intrigued with the Project Management section. We are using a commercial professional program to manage the 4 projects that make up the one large schedule for this ship we are building, but day to day details are managed by fire drill. Using a program like ZOHO would give our leaders the ability to communicate and manage the entire team, using the same methods we use to manage construction. Tasks, Milestones, Document Sharing, Forums, Milestones, Calendar (my favorite), Time Tracking, and Gantt charts are included in this package
Zoho Projects let’s you manage one project for free, so I loaded up my first Dosovo client project and started working through the project details. I could create task lists and milestones, upload and create documents (via Zoho Writer and Zoho Sheet), track my time via timesheets and give clients access to the process to see things moving along. Things worked so smoothly for the first project, I ponied up $8 and upgraded to the next subscription level (allowing me to track more projects at once) and added two other projects with similar tasks, goals and timesheets.
I’ve been trying out project management options, looking for a way to track everyone’s todo lists, meetings, time and clients in one place. I’ve eventually landed on Zoho Projects and purchased a paid account. I’m really happy with the options it provides and the interface it uses.
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.
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.
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 task lists not associated with a milestone ... 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.
[Zoho Projects] offers multiple options for categorizing and keeping track of tasks (% complete, duration, priority, e-mail notifications, and notes). You have one-click navigation to most sections of Zoho Projects. You can even swap between projects from any screen - making this a much more efficient tool for those managing multiple projects ... Other valuable features include ‘Forums’ (a more robust version of Basecamp’s writeboard), and the ‘Reports’ section (which automatically displays basic GANTT charts based on your tasks’ settings) ... all in all Zoho Projects is simply superior for those project managers who are looking for a relatively easy to use online project management tool. And surprisingly, the subscription versions of Zoho Projects are less expensive than those from Basecamp.
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 [Zoho Projects] 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.
What I can say is that from what I have seen, Zoho Projects is very comprehensive project management solution. The feature set is everything you would expect from any other project management application - there are tasks, milestones, calendars, meetings, timesheets, reports, forums, even a documents area where users can upload documents related to the project.
The interface is beautiful. The entire thing is run through Ajax, and once you are logged in and into your project, I didn’t see a single pageload - it’s all wonderfully smooth and a prime example of a rich web application.
Zoho Projects is awesome and I don’t think that’s an understatement either. The Zoho team developers seem to push out new products so quickly and they are all of a very high standard. Zoho Projects is, in my opinion, by far the most impressive Zoho offering yet. It blows away other online project management solutions like Basecamp, not only because of its Ajax pageload-free interface, but the feature set rivals and exceeds that of Basecamp.
Zoho Projects is a very easy to setup and use web based project management application. It took me just under 5 minutes to get going. It provides all the necessary features in the free version and its ease of use could well prompt some businesses to upgrade to the Premium Version.
