Configuring your portal in Zoho Projects is a critical step in tailoring the platform to your organization's needs. This involves various actions, from establishing project timelines and budget parameters to automating tasks.

Portal Settings:

Under this section, you can change the portal logo, and set the portal name as "Donally Apartments". You can configure the sender email to communicate from your own domain. Portal URLs can be changed, and portal owners can be reassigned from a list of administrators.

Custom Domain:

Having a custom domain allows businesses to create a branded experience for your users and clients. By mapping your custom domain, you can reinforce your company's identity ensuring that all the project-related activities are under your company's domain name.

For example, if your portal name is "donallyapartmentconstructions", your default project URL will be https://projects.zoho.com/portal/donallyapartmentconstructions. With custom domain, it will be https://donallyapartmentconstructions.com/portal/abc.

Disclaimer:

Businesses have certain policies or terms that every user must adhere to. Disclaimer can be used to present such policies to users and get confirmation of their understanding and acceptance of the policy.

The Issue tracking and Milestone modules in Zoho Projects can be renamed to align with business requirements.

For example, in a construction company, Issues can be renamed as Defects, which aligns with the construction industry's terminology, making it easier for the team to understand the project's components.

Delete Portal:

This function allows the portal owner to completely delete their Zoho Projects domain while also taking a backup of their data that is stored on our server.

User Settings:

This allows you to configure the display name of the users. You can also set a hierarchy among the users in your organization.

Date & Time Settings:

Under this tab, you can specify date format, time format and the first day of the week. You can establish your organization's business hours by specifying the start and end times for a typical workday. You can choose working days to determine which days are considered weekends so that the work items can be scheduled based on your selection.

By configuring holidays, you can account for non-working days in your project schedules and ensure accurate project planning.

For example, you can add 25th of December as a holiday. Doing so, no tasks will be scheduled on that particular day.

Project & Project Groups:

This tab allows you to configure your project-related settings such as project and project group prefixes, private project groups for restricted access, tags for classification, and options for calculating the project completion percentages.

Under Budget Settings, you can enable project budget, restrict access to the budget based on the user profiles, and set default currency. Once the budget is enabled you can define the frequency at which the budget will automatically update. You will have the option to include non-billable hours for cost calculations. You can configure email notifications if the actual cost surpasses the threshold or the planned budget. You can also enable the Revenue Budget and Earned Value Management (EVM) to evaluate the project's performance.

In the currency tab, you can set a base currency to establish a standard for financial operations and reporting in Zoho Projects. While setting the base currency, the exchange rate can be added to determine the value of home currency.

Consider a scenario where you're managing a construction project for "Donally Construction" that involves multiple international suppliers and contractors. Your company is based in the US and the majority of your clients are from Europe. You can set the base currency as US dollar and input the current exchange rate of Euros to convert the transaction into USD. This helps "Donally Construction" maintain financial clarity even when dealing with diverse currencies on a global scale.

Zoho Projects provides multiple settings to enhance task management. You can maintain task order, control prefixes and IDs, set task duration and dependencies. You can also allocate resources, and associate tasks with defects while choosing to receive alerts. You can enable organizational-level task dependency settings which automatically realigns the successor tasks when the due date is changed.

In this tab, you can define time log permissions, manage logs for closed tasks and defects, control timers, and set restrictions based on task work hours. You can also establish time limits for logging hours and customize reminders for low-hour thresholds. Users can log hours for a set number of past and future days, enhancing flexibility in time tracking.

You can manage timesheet approval settings by enforcing approval for log entries, regulating approval permissions for approvers, and configuring automatic approvals.

In a construction company, timesheet approval ensures accurate recording of daily jobs and approval of work hours by allowing supervisors to review and approve timesheets.

In the preference tab, you can select portal and client users to exclude them from receiving the email notifications. These settings help in extensive management of task, milestone, forum, and other notifications. Both portal users and client users can receive updates for tasks or milestones that they have created, those that have been assigned to you or your team, and those you follow for tracking progress.

Zia is an AI-driven chatbot within Zoho Projects where you can ask question and get immediate responses about your projects, tasks, issues, and other modules.

For example, if you are a project manager working on-site and you need to check the progress of a critical task, you can use Zia to inquire about the task's status, completion percentage, and any associated issues.