Item: Zoho Projects
Rating: 8
Author: Sudip Chakraborty

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Zoho projects is used across the whole organization for both internal and external (client) projects. It allows us to organize all company and project level activities in one place that is acceessible by everyone we provide access to at a reasonable cost. It also allows us to track and report on time spent on activities within projects.

Pros and Cons

Zoho Projects is web-based so anyone can access it.
Zoho Projects has a fairly comprehensive set of features for project management, task and time tracking.
The pricing is reasonable and affordable for small businesses.

There is no ability to add custom fields in the "Bugs" module - for example, if we want to add fields such as Version Number.
Reporting is not integrated - its a fairly expensive add-on.
There is no easy way to track actual and completed dates for tasks - so historical variance analysis is not easy.

Return on Investment

Increased employee efficiency
Better insight into project tasks and timesheets

Alternatives Considered

microsoft project,manymoons,37signals,Basecamp

Best combination of features, usability and price

Likelihood to Recommend

1. Level of project management sophistication - if you are used to Microsoft Project this will seem very basic.

2.While the basic version is quite inexpensive, it gets a little expensive as you upgrade to higher levels (e.g. bugs module, premium).

Users and Roles

11 - Senior Management
Business Analysts
Administrative Assistant
Technology Project Manager
Software Developers

Support Headcount Required

1 - Minimal skills required - just a basic understanding of projects, tasks, timesheets and "pages" or wikis is sufficient.

Business Processes Supported

Client Project Management
Time Tracking of milestones and task lists
Meeting notes (in Wikis/Pages)
Bug tracking (we renamed "Bugs" to "Issues and Learnings") since we use it for all types of issues - not just for reporting and tracking software bugs

Innovative Uses

We have expanded use of "Bugs" module to track any types of "Issues" e.g. client issues so we can analyze and learn from them
We use Zoho Projects to keep track of Corporate Goals (in addition to using them for Client and Internal Projects)

Future Planned Uses

Integrate with Zoho Reports so that we can analyze timesheet data in client projects so that we can make data-driven estimates in future.
Integrate with GitHub so that we have one integrated system for both software development and software project management

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Support Rating

Generally quite good.

Zoho Projects Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Support understands my problem Support cares about my success	Slow Initial Response

Premium Support

No - We have not needed premium support since we get most of our questions answered within 24 hours or less via Help material available online, forums or responses from the Zoho Support team.

Zoho Projects enables project management, time sheet management and collaboration across distributed teams at a fair cost.

Overall Satisfaction with Zoho Projects