The official Zoho blog has announced Zoho Projects, a new online project management tool to add to Zoho’s already impressive product line-up.
Now I don’t have very much to compare Zoho Projects to - I’m not in possession of any desktop project management software. Also I don’t have enough time to do a very in-depth review, so I’ll just review some of the main points about Projects.
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.
No doubt about it, I am very impressed by Zoho Projects. Now I haven’t seen this so far, but integration between Projects and the other Zoho solutions (such as Writer) would make this absolutely killer. You can upload external documents and link them to your project, but what I’d like to see is the ability to link your Zoho Writer documents, Sheet spreadsheets and Show presentations into your projects.
TechCrunch’s review on Zoho Projects mentioned that a single sign-on would make the Zoho offerings better, and I would agree here but also say that what Zoho need now is to work on the integration; to make the Zoho productts feel like one thing, like Microsoft Office, for example, and have the ability to share data between them and they have a good chance of taking some market share from their rivals.
Am I too kind to Zoho Projects? It might be that I just haven’t seen many project management solutions before (I’ve used Basecamp a bit, but that’s all) so I might be being ‘wowed’ by features that are expected, but Zoho Projects as a rich web application in its own right is very good.
Keep it coming, Zoho.
