"Zoho Projects brought it all together for us in one solution", says Raw Engineering Team

We recently spoke to the team behind

Raw Engineering, a company that specializes in web and mobile application development about how they have been using Zoho Projects. With offices and clients in San Francisco and Mumbai, this 35-person company is on a mission to solve the toughest web architecture and integration challenges. To that end, Raw Engineering has built its core development expertise in .NET, Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Mobile and related Web 2.0 and rich internet application technologies. The company has built its reputation with highly qualified engineers, competitive rates and technical integrity.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation with

Nishant Patel, CEO of Raw Engineering

How did you become a Zoho Projects customer?

Raw Engineering required a collaborative project management solution for its application development projects. We needed a solution that could enable 30 users working on 10 projects to track bugs and quality assurance, among other tasks. In addition to a rich feature set, Raw Engineering developers wanted an application that was easy to use, integrated with third-party applications like Google Apps and also an affordable 

project management software.

We tried a lot of different applications before Zoho Projects. Applications like

Unfuddle, Assembla and Basecamp were just harder to use

and didn’t have all the features Zoho offered. Zoho Projects was the right fit. And the integration with Gmail – which lets us create bug entries directly from Gmail – was a big feature that sold 

(the concept of using Zoho Projects to)

 the team. That integration helps keep the whole team organized and in sync.

What are the benefits provided by Zoho Projects?

Tasks and Bug Tracking :

Raw engineering developers tracked bugs, tasks with quality assurance in no time by which they recognized the value of the bug tracking, tasks, milestones combined with support and group chat of Zoho Projects which put them all on the same page and on top of the projects.

Project Wiki

turned out to be an unexpected bonus. Company developers use the project wiki to maintain an internal knowledge base and to share documentation with their clients.

Project Forums

Questions and answers from the raw engineering user forums are also brought back into Project forums. This way the expert knowledge is tapped and captured in a single place for future developments.

Google Apps Integration

Other products from Google Apps Marketplace are good in specific areas, but they didn’t integrate as well with third-party apps like Gmail, felt Nishant Patel. But, Zoho Projects brought it all together, has a one solution that’s really simple, fast and responsive – easy to use and administer.

Gmail Contextual Gadgets

The integration with Gmail, which allowed us to create tasks and bug entries directly from right within their Gmail was a big feature that sold (the concept of using Zoho Projects to) the team. In addition, it kept the whole team organized and in sync on latest happenings going on in a project.

Here’s a nice snap of the Raw Engineering team working on a mobile project.

 

Final thoughts on Zoho?




As a web application development shop, Raw Engineering almost exclusively uses web-based products and has used Zoho applications prior to Zoho Projects. About four-five years ago, we began adopting Zoho online applications, starting with productivity applications such as Zoho Writer, Zoho Sheet, and Zoho Show.

We’ve been following Zoho for a long time. The world of cloud computing is something that we’re following very closely as something that raw engineering specializes in  for our clients. So using Zoho Projects, an online tool, to help improve our company and improve our

project management overall is a huge validation of

Zoho and the online philosophy. As a team, we’re all using the same tool, and we’re all on the same page and on top of our projects” said Patel.