A customer from Poland recently e-mailed our Zoho Projects support team with two questions:
The first question is easy and short: all of Zoho Projects versions (including the Free one) include an unlimited number of users.
I would like to ask you how many people can collaborate on free and upper price versions and second but most important question: How does Zoho Projects support agile and short iterations project development
The answer to the second one is also short. Zoho Projects supports Agile development very well. But it warrants some further explanation.
The first item the Agile methodology manifesto is to put "Individuals & interactions over processes & tools". No young and growing company likes processes, but we all love our tools. (For those people not familiar with the Agile methodology, it's basically a set of principles about how teams working on a software product go about creating that product.)
In fact, we argue that the right tools can in fact put "individuals and interactions" front and center. And that's exactly what the newly-released Zoho Projects 2.0 is for. It allows teams to collaborate and work in quick iterations to get their work done.
Take for example the following three scenarios:
1. Embedded (and included in the price) group chat room helps your team make decisions faster. While Agile emphasizes face-to-face interactions, sometimes that's not possible. In the case of Zoho, we have a distributed company, with most of the product and marketing activities happening between US, India and Japan. Even when your projects team is local, your customer might not. Zoho Projects also allows you to set both "internal" and "external" (i.e. customer) users, so you can set different levels of access for each.
2. The Project Stream and the Twitter-like status updates gives you a quick update on everything happening in the project. With Agile, milestones and task due dates are not set in stone - they are always changing. Zoho Projects helps you keep your team appraised as there are changes in the schedules and plans.
3. Older software development methodologies argued for "requirements" to be set in stone and pretty much frozen before the first line of code was written. In contrast, Agile calls for flexibility around deadlines and when requirements come int. Zoho Project's included project Wiki is an ideal place where the entire team can keep track of the changing requirements. And of course, not only that, you can also go back and track how the requirements have changed over time using version control.
I hope that addresses the question. This is just a subset of the things you can do with Zoho Projects 2.0, but we found them to be the most relevant for an agile methodology. Of course, Zoho Projects also has the traditional milestones - task - priorities functionality that is essential to any structured project.
Rodrigo
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