Zoho Projects Goes Social – Adds Twitter like ‘Project’ Stream

sinha | July 1st, 2009

Online collaboration is a beast and readers of this site have been getting a doze of online collab tools very frequently.

Today, Zoho has entered into the ‘Yammer/Twitter’ domain of live streaming (and lot more) and has launched a newer version of Zoho projects.

Zoho projects enables you to import your mpp files,keep projects organized and most importantly, help you collaborate with your team.

The Project Stream keeps you up-to-date about the latest activities going on around your project
Set your User Status to let your team members know what you’re working on (you can think of that like a private Twitter for your Project)
Keep all your meetings, milestones and tasks organized in the shared calendar
Store your files and documents in one place, keep track of the changes with the version history
Discussions – interactive forums make everyone a part of the conversation – and keep important topics and decisions available for everyone to see
Create team and project web pages with the integrated Wiki
Always-on, embedded chat means you can chat with your entire team – or with only one person using just your browser. And it also keeps a log of what’s been said so you can refer back to past conversation. And you can also setup different ‘chat rooms’ – one for every topic you’re discussing. – more

Couple of enhancements are a sure welcome

Timesheet will help you track time and is integrated with Zoho Invoice.
Reports helps you track each team members performance against stated goal.

Like we said earlier, Zoho is competing to replace your IT department and is potentially a bigger play than Google.

Having said that, if you start using Zoho for your daily use (as a user, and not a blogger/critic), you will find frequent breaks that just hurts the user experience (for instance, I am unable to create a Zoho project at the time of writing this article) – there are too many open loops in the product, married with nearly wrong English.

If you are a daily use of Zoho, we would like to know your experience.

View this introductory demo of Zoho projects

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About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in. He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]

3 Responses to "Zoho Projects Goes Social – Adds Twitter like ‘Project’ Stream"

Pavan says:

July 1, 2009 at 8:45 pm

I use their service for my company and I love their products.I did mention them here sometimes recently

1)I got hold of them when looking for invoicing tool ,and i loved the interface and simplicity.

2)Next I used zoho project because ,I can use time sheet feature and integrate to their invoice product .

I also use their creator/report products as well for company accounting and it was downright easy to build apps.

Agreed ,they use js/ajax heavily in UX and that trips first time users but once i got hold of it,it was easy to use.

Most importantly i am continuing to use their product for their customer service.very responsive

Overall on scale of 5,my experience
Support:5
Features:4
UI :3

Reply
Aravind says:

July 2, 2009 at 11:07 am

Ashish : Thanks for the review. With the free version, you can have one project with unlimited users. If you can email support, they will help sort out your issues. We’ll look for wrong English usage in our UI too.

Pavan : Thanks a lot for your compliments and comments!

Reply
- Ashish says:
  
  July 2, 2009 at 4:44 pm
  
  Thanks Arvind for the reply.
  Regd. wrong english – if somebody shares a doc/sheet on zoho with another user, the message reads ‘”X” has shared a doc to you”, while it should be ‘with you’. There are few more examples.
  
  I do love Zoho!
  
  Reply