Zoho Projects, our project management and collaboration service has really taken off since we introduced the redesigned and revamped version about 7 months ago. Our user base (and associated revenue) has been steadily increasing since then and we are of course encouraged by the feedback people constantly provide us about the service.
And of course, we keep improving Zoho Projects on a daily basis. Today we have a few enhancements that we want to share with you. Most of these came as a direct result of customer feedback. Thanks!
More - and enhanced! - project reports
We have to admit that, while useful, the project reports we had were not as good looking as they could be. So that's one area that we have been working at lately. Today we are happy to announce that we have made great progress on this and we are releasing a revamped set of cool reports - not only for your information but also for your enjoyment.
Also, the average number of projects our users work on has been, not surprisingly, increasing as well. And this means that at some point, people want to have a summary view of how things are going across projects. So we also created a couple new useful reports: Milestones and Completion status across projects. Both help you track the different activities across all of your projects. In addition, we also created a new Timesheet report.
'Watch' a Forum Topic
Project forums allow teams to hold important conversations and make decisions in a centralized place everyone can refer to later on. One of the most requested features for the project Forums was the ability to "watch" a particular conversation - that is, be notified whenever someone made a reply to a particular post. So we added this, as well as a count of how many people are following that particular topic so users can judge how popular that topic has been. Of course, all activity that happens here is still reflected on the project stream.
Project Announcements
Since I mentioned the Project Stream part, let me touch on this nice little feature: Project Announcements. Customers have told us that the Project Stream is a nice way to keep up with whatever is going with a project and all the activities happening inside it. However, some important things were getting "lost" in the stream. That's why we have created the 'Announcement' section in the Project Stream, where project administrators can post important announcements for the team:
Nice URLs: I want my "Back" button
This is mostly a technical thing and I won't bore you with the details. But the bottom line is that previously, navigation inside a project had to be done using only the web navigation interface - that means - you couldn't use the "back" button. And you couldn't just copy the link in your browser and send it to a team mate to point her to a specific part of the project. But we've changed that now. Yes - you get your 'Back' button, well... back! :)
Export Project Data / Backup
Although the data that you store in Zoho Projects (and all of our other Zoho services) is safe and backed-up periodically, many people still like to make a back-up copy that they store somewhere else. On the other hand, it is one of our core beliefs that the data that you store on Zoho is yours and you should be able to do with it as you please. We just hadn't gotten around this part, but now we are pleased to offer a full project-export functionality that you can use to download all of your project data in one single file.
Migrate into Zoho Projects and import project data
And just like you can export your project data, you can also import it. But that's not all. Based on some requests we've gotten in the past, we are making it easier for people to come into Zoho Projects from other project management/collaboration places. In fact, we have had this for quite a bit now since we started getting a good number of these migration requests so we thought we'd find a general solution for it. We hadn't announced it because we didn't thought it was fair to allow people to migrate into Z Projects without allowing them to easily migrate out of it should they want to do so. So now that we have the export piece ready we are announcing this as well.
We hope you'll find these updates useful. Sign in (or sign-up!) to check them out.
Rodrigo
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