Hey there Zoho team,

I am in the trial phase and have started using your platform for about 4 hours so far on the free trial period.  I'm very experienced in project management software in my professional life.  Our family is looking for a consumer/small business level product we can use for complicated projects we do - like remodeling, landscaping, family office project and other types of projects. Our needs don't require expensive highly sophisticated project planning features so I searched for consumer/small business platform reviews, found Zoho and decided to give it a try.   I have already entered enough of one of our projects to have a good understanding of the platform pluses and minuses.  I generally like most of your project management software features and the system is easy to learn, at least for someone with project planning and management experience.  However I've already run into two very big problems as described below.  I need to know whether or not these problems will be fixed soon before I continue investing time into your platform and switch to a paid monthly plan.  Please let me know by replying to this post whether or not you intend to fix these very basic problems with your entry level feature set.

1 - First BIG DEFICIENCY IN ZOHO PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE FEATURES - THERE IS NO WAY TO DEFINE A WORK WEEK THAT EXCLUDES WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS UNLESS YOU BUY THE PREMIUM VERSION OF THE SOFTWARE THAT IS INTENDED FOR LARGE ENTERPRISES.  In the immortal and often cited phrase of Vice President Biden - "Come-on man!  Really?"  This is one of the most basic features of any useful project management software.  A project planner needs to be able to input the durations for tasks, define the dependencies between the tasks, and then have the project management software automatically calculate and report the project timeline in various formats (Gantt, calendar, task list, etc).  It's silly and debilitating to deprive users of this required feature unless they pay a premium price because it makes the software far more difficult, time consuming and confusing to use.  By depriving basic users of this feature you are forcing them to "fudge" the number of days/hours or weeks they must enter for tasks to account for the fact weekends and holidays are not excluded from the calculations to calculate the project calendar.   Any other decent project management software automatically excludes weekends and holidays from available days unless the project planner/user specifically enters settings to include weekends/holidays.  This basic feature is already in the Zoho platform because it's available to users if they pay more money.  Zoho needs to stop depriving basic users (non-enterprise/premium plan users) of the ability to exclude weekends and holidays from project schedule calculations.  Virtually all of Zoho's very capable competitors don't deprive any of their users of this feature so I will switch to one of them before my free trial expires if Zoho doesn't confirm they will fix this.

2 - SECOND BIG DEFICIENCY IN ZOHO PROJECT MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE FEATURES - ZOHO ONLY ALLOWS RESOURCE UTILIZATION TRACKING FOR "USERS" - THEREFORE THERE IS NO WAY TO CREATE A "REAL RESOURCE LIST" AND ASSIGN RESOURCES ON THE LIST TO TASKS FOR THE PURPOSE OF TRACKING RESOURCE UTILIZATION - THIS IS A MAJOR SHORTCOMING AND IT  DRIVES UP MONTHLY SOFTWARE USE LICENSE COST FOR NO REASON.  On the Zoho platform there is no effective resource definition because only project management software platform users can be a "resource".  This forces project admins and planners to create "FAKE USERS" AND "PRETEND THE FAKE USER IS A RESOURCE" for the purpose of tracking resource utilization.  Whether intended or not by Zoho, creating fake users instead of simply creating a resource identifier drives up monthly software usage costs because cost is based on the number of "users".  In addition, it is completely impractical to create enough "fake users" in a project that has a large number of actual resources that need to be tracked.  Resource utilization assessment is a very basic and required feature in ANY AND ALL project management software.  Resource utilization allows the project planner to determine how much a given project resource is utilized at a given point in time and identify times when a given resource is over utilized (utilized at more than 100% of it's utilization capacity) or under utilized.  This allows bottlenecks where a resource over utilization will cause schedule completion delays to be identified and addressed.  It also allows under utilized resources to be identified so unused resource capacity can be filled up in the plan.  This feature is one of the main reasons to bother using software rather than a pad and pen to plan a project.  As other users have clearly explained in their Zoho user forum posts, and as the team at Zoho knows very well, AS A GENERAL RULE RESOURCES ARE NOT USERS AND USERS ARE NOT RESOURCES.  While it is true that sometimes a resource can be a person who happens to be a project management software user, more often a resource has nothing to do with a project software user.  For example a resource is often a conference room, a piece of equipment, a vehicle, a contractor who is not aa software user, a worker who is not a software user and any number of other people or things that are not software users.  A user on the other hand can be a project management software system admin or other type of software user who uses the software but doesn't have ANY task assignments so is therefore not a resource in a project that needs to be traced with the resource utilization feature.  Zoho needs to add a real resource utilization tracking feature that allows a user to enter a resource list, assign resources on the list to tasks, and then track utilization of each resource on the list.  This is another feature Zoho needs to confirm they will fix before I extend my free trial to a paid usage account.