Given the unique nature of businesses, a ready-made project management solution cannot work for them all. At the same time, building a tool from the ground up exclusively for your business can be too cumbersome. This is why at Zoho Projects we combine both: an extensive app that also has customization capabilities built in. You can take the app and tailor parts of it to fit your business. Adding to the arsenal of existing customization options like custom fields, statuses, and logo, we are now introducing custom profiles and roles for users.
What are roles and profiles?
Like the name suggests, a user’s role refers to the part they play in a team or the designation they hold. A profile, on the other hand, is a set of permissions that decides what a user can and can’t do. A profile or a role can be assigned to many users, but a user is assigned a single profile and role at a given time. By customizing the default roles and profiles, and creating your own, you can get very granular about what kind of access each of your team members has. This not only ensures security, but also makes sure team members have access to only what is relevant to their work.
By default, Zoho Projects has a list of profiles with pre-defined permissions which cannot be removed. With the exception of the Admin, you can customize all other profiles and create new ones too. You can even decide which user profiles have permissions to create or edit other profiles. Learn more.
Just what is needed, no more, no less.
Let’s say Zylker’s employees have different profiles like Administrators, Managers, Technical Experts, Developers, Testers, Debuggers, Designers and a few others. Administrators and Managers need broad access across the application and have extensive privileges. While Developers and Testers have access to Tasks and Issues, it is enough for Debuggers to only access the Issues module.
Helen, the Admin, further breaks this down. A Tester has all Issue module permissions like add, edit, view, and delete, whereas a Debugger can only view and edit. Going even deeper, Helen restricts the Tester to performing edit or delete operations only on the issues they add.
But, not all of Zylker’s projects are the same. A Designer may need controlled access in one and extensive access in the other. So, Helen customizes Profile permissions for each project.
In addition to user profiles, Helen also creates new Client profiles like Technical partner and Vendor, and controls the data that they get to view and edit.
Here’s a look at the different permissions in Profiles and Roles and how they’re set in Zoho Projects:
I’ll let you in on another great update that is soon to come: You’ll also get to @mention a Role to notify everyone in the role in one go.
In other news, we had a couple of interesting features released in the recent past. Here’s a recap in case you haven’t checked them out yet.
Dependency across projects
When one project relies on another in order to move forward, it’s easy to get held up. This is now easy to manage with task dependencies across projects. Define relationships between tasks of different projects and track them closely.
Task and Project Numbering
Like issues, now both projects and tasks have unique IDs added to them. This will come in handy when you want to search more quickly or tag tasks and issues in your statuses and comments. You can edit and create your own prefixes, and also disable the Task and Project IDs for your projects.
Go ahead and give these features a whirl. We’d love to hear how these features work for each of your unique businesses.
Hi, Can you please add the ability to allow a non-admin to go into archives for read only? This is a huge issue with our team as managers need to go back into archives to reference documentation. Thank you
Hi Dan, Thanks for sending your requirement across. We will take this up!
Hi there, Is there a way to change the permissions so that certain tasks or task lists may not be view able to everyone who can see the project? It looks like the update allows for complete removal of tasks all together - but I am looking for permissions to allow users to view certain tasks. Is it an all or nothing option?
Hi Hollie, For now, it is the all or nothing model. But going forward we do have plans to allow access for certain tasks/tasklists.
Hello, When, specifically-- will we be able to change the permissions so that certain tasks or task lists may not be view able to everyone who can see the project? "going forward" is not helpful, and doesn't help us plan. Please provide specific dates and lists (by priority) for the planned updates in the software. I was advised that Zoho does not provide this information. I don't understand why this is NOT provided/posted online? This is VERY important for admins and users that are using the software.