Zoho Projects

About a year ago Zoho added the bug-tracking module to its project-management service Zoho Projects. But the trouble with this module was that it was available only in the most expensive version of the service, which costs $699/year. Now Zoho launches a separate service Zoho BugTracker. "Finally, they wake up!" - most developers will say now and start testing the service. They will be even more delighted when find out that Zoho BugTracker provides the interface on their native language (16 languages supported), integrated with the popular free project hosting GitHub, integrated with Google Docs, fully integrated with Email (for notifications, and adding bugs), contains forum, file storage, activity streams, custom workflows, custom fields, custom views and reports. However, the positive will be finished when the developers take a look at the price.

The online project management and project collaboration service Zoho Projects becomes interesting for software companies, as it gets quite functional bug tracker. It allows you to add bugs, assign owners, collaborate on bugs and control their statuses. There are flexible options for email-notifications of various actions in the system. You can set the individual processes and rules for the automation of certain operations - for example, when issue status changed, it can automatically be assigned to another owner (for example, to tester) and change its priority. Unfortunately, the bug tracker is included only in the most expensive Zoho Projects subscription plan ($ 699 per year for 30 GB and unlimited number of users). But for these money you get the most featured online project management system on the market, which includes: project plan, calendar, tasks, file sharing, forum, chat, wiki, time tracker, billing, bug tracker, reports. In addition, Zoho Projects is seamlessly integrated with other Zoho services and Google Apps.

As you know, Google Apps has no specialized project management solution, and this is very disappointing, as there are many other useful utilities for online workgroups there. However, there are three tools that can be used to solve this problem. And the first of them is Google Sites. You can use Google Sites to manage one large project, or create a site for each small project in it (there are even some templates for project sites). Since Google Sites is, in fact, a wiki, you can easily work with the project documentation there. In addition, Google Sites allows you to embed group calendar (Google Calendar), task list (Google Tasks) and documents from Google Docs. All these elements are very useful for project management, but of course, task collaboration in this solution - is the weakness.

Zoho continues to integrate its products with competitors. At that time the online project management service, Zoho Projects, was integrated with Google Apps. And it makes sense, as Google Apps don't provide own project and task management tools. So what has been done? First, customers can now login to Zoho Projects with the same username and password they use for Google Apps. Second, from now users can link their documents from Goolge Docs to the projects inside Zoho Projects (its interesting that Google still doesn't provide similar function in GMail and Google Sites, where it could be useful).