As you know, Peter and I are part of a new tech podcast, PodDev. Previously we had been using Basecamp to plan our episodes, but in the wake of Peter’s positive review of Zoho Projects, we transfered to that system. However, no system is ever perfect, and so after the jump I have published a feedback email that I sent to Zoho, requesting some features and pointing out some problems I have with it.

Hi,

As I said might happen, we decided to move PodDev podcast planning over to Zoho Projects, and I have now had an opportunity to really get to know Zoho Projects. I thought you might appreciate some fairly detailed feedback. As with my Writer feedback, the suggestions below are some of the negative aspects of Projects. Overall, I believe it is a stronger product than either ActiveCollab or Basecamp, hence our decision to switch to it!

The first problem is the lack of an option to notify members of changes. This is a feature available in BaseCamp which we are missing. It would be great if the writer of a new forum post could opt to notify members that it had been created, possibly even including the text of the message in the email. I don’t know whether you took a positive decision not to include this feature, since you have quite rightly included notifcation for meetings, but I think it would be a useful feature, even if individual members had the option to opt out from different types of notifcation emails.

Related to this is the lack of RSS feeds. Whilst the appeal of RSS is currently limited to early adopters, these people are likely to be the early opinion formers on your product and would certainly appreciate such a feature. One way to differentiate between BaseCamp and Zoho Projects could be to create custom RSS feeds for each user. That is, allow an individual user to select or deselect certain types of notification from their feed. For example, a given user might want to recieve the latest forum posts in his or her feed, but not the approaching milestones.

The second problem is the time zone. PodDev is fairly unique in that it is planned by people in both the UK and the US. Unfortunately Zoho Projects does not have the ability for individual users to set their own time zone, and then automatically change all times for that user accordingly. We would certainly find this extremely useful.

Another feature which would be great is if there were some ability to actively record the time that one is spending on a particular project, in a similar way to the recently released SlimTimer. This is less important to PodDev, but for commercial projects I can imagine this being much more crucial.

It would also be useful to have more options for user roles, or the ability to create new roles and give them permissions. The current restriction to Contractor, Employee or Manager is not really very useful. This may be a feature you are including with the paid packages, however.

All in all Zoho Projects is fantastic. It is an absolute triumph of Ajax technologies, and typifies the advantages of the Web 2.0 approach. I look forward to seeing it combined with (soon to be released?) Zoho Drive and other products to create a great system.

Thanks,

Huw Leslie