Zoho Projects: A glimpse of our year so far. 

The year is halfway over, and we’ve been hard at work improving your experience with Projects. Say hello to an upgraded Zoho Projects that comes with new and enhanced features to give you a productivity boost. Read on to learn more!

Lay it all out – Multiple layouts for projects

Zoho Projects is introducing multiple layouts for your different needs. Let’s use the example of a musician in a record company. It would make sense for the business to follow a standard layout for managing all its administration activities. However, the musician would need the tool more for keeping track of their bookings and the logistics of their tours. The fields for managing administration don’t really apply to their work. A layout that’s tailored to address event planning work would help more. After all, software that you use to manage work shouldn’t make you work harder. That’s why we introduced our multi-layout functionality, to facilitate layouts that record details which are more relevant to your work. We’ve also added a few other custom fields to our existing list. You can now add URL, phone, and email fields to your projects.

Control access – Task field permissions

Introducing enhanced Roles and Permissions—you now have field-level permissions to go deep and break down your tasks at the field level. You can now set your system so your employees can only view and modify tasks that they’re assigned to or tagged in. With our new field-level permissions, you can require that only some profiles—like a manager or admin—can assign tasks to others, while the other profiles can only assign tasks to themselves. The user profiles can be given view or edit permissions for each field in your tasks. You can also make sure that particular fields are hidden, or can’t be edited. For example, if you don’t want your employees to change the task dates, it can be done. If there’s a particular custom field like “Externally committed end date” that you want only your managers to be aware of, you can do that, too.

Work easy – Subtasks in Kanban view 

Easily manage all of your tasks by simply moving them across a board. Our Kanban view has now been enhanced to introduce subtasks. Even with carefully laid out plans, there are always factors that can cause changes to a project in real-time. For a construction project, getting permits for land may have originally been a subtask, but unforeseen legal problems can make it complicated. Now this can become a task on its own that requires you to do a whole set of activities to solve it. In Zoho Projects, you can now simply drag and drop to reorder subtasks or make them into parent tasks in Kanban view.

Be alert – Threshold and budget reach alerts 

Keep your project spending in check. It’s easy to get caught up in your work and spend more than what was planned. There’s also always a chance of unexpected expenses. With Zoho Projects, you can set up a threshold for your budget and get notified with email alerts when you hit it. There’s also an option for getting alerts when you reach your planned project budget.

Balance for better – Resource allocation

Use resource allocation to efficiently balance the workload among your employees. When creating and assigning tasks, it’s possible to see which users are under-utilized, over-utilized, or unavailable on specified dates. You can also select an owner to see if they’re available at that particular period, and how full their plate is. This saves you the time it would take to go to the resource utilization chart to check everyone’s workload after all the tasks have been assigned.

That’s not all! We have several exciting updates in the works for you. Stay tuned to find out what’s up!

Until then, we wish you many happy projects! 🙂