PDS Vista vs. Zoho Projects

You have the option of taking the system in house or being a hosted client. Figure out what resources your IT department has to spare, if you will have a dedicated administrator who will do all the upgrades and enhancements or if you will be job sharing those responsibilities. Like all software, Vista HRMS has multiple upgrades a year. You will need someone or a team of a few individuals to test these upgrades out and be able to take on a role of administrator, technology consultant or front end user and make sure these upgrades are working from all angles. Vista HRMS really is a good product for keeping all HR and Payroll related records in one system, I just stress the fact that you have to have someone on hand who wants to own the product and be willing to learn as much as possible. The more you put into this product, the more you will get out of it

My work involves projects of 5-15 people with numerous projects running simultaneously. Prior to Zoho, I did not have a central location from which to view all project statuses at once. Zoho looks to provide this and also looks like it will deliver. I am anxious to see how our organization's use of it develops. At this time, I feel I am likely to recommend Zoho Projects because my organization has made great software decisions in the past so I have a level of trust already that the research has been done that Zoho is the best solution for our line of work.

Incentivized

• Vista HRMS is very flexible, it does everything we need for HR, benefits and payroll. It’s user-friendly and intuitive to use, when we roll out new self-service items our employees have no problems and require minimal training or documentation.
• PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are usually addressed within a few days. We were upgrading our production servers to Windows 2012 over a weekend and a key person in our organization was on leave. When we checked with PDS to see what cost would be involved if we needed their help, they said it was included in our regular maintenance, no extra cost.
• The PDS User’s Conference is an excellent learning opportunity for training on everything Vista does, including using Crystal Reports for custom reporting. You also get to meet and talk to the executive and development staff and have direct input into the future product development.

• Swiss Army Knife: The suite of Zoho projects can be tailored to fit the needs of any business. It's great to have a bunch of different software offerings that will work together seamlessly.
• Task Customization: Zoho allows you to customize your tasks more than other platforms (add start dates, due dates, dependencies, subtasks...)

Incentivized

• Job History - Too many areas that dates populate.
• ATS - There is a lack of flexibility for applicants when applying for multiple jobs.
• Searching - The functionality is a little limited, would be nice to type in any information on a person and search.

Incentivized

• More flexibility on making the user interface more compact (like Excel or MSP). Current interface is well spaced, but some users may like a more compact view.
• More simplified Gantt Charts that help us understand progress and dependencies.
• Ability to export projects to Excel for sharing with others we can't/don't want to bring on to Zoho projects

Incentivized

It's working well for us. Yes, we do have some challenges, but we're working through them. With all the time and money put in to this, why would we switch. Especially since we really haven't used this product to it's full potential, but that's many due to time challenges.

Zoho has been able to fit the needs of our Engineering organization. The employees and management that are using it have not found a 'catastrophic' reason to discontinue use. Although certain features and better support mechanisms would be much better, it has been able to keep with both basic needs and more advanced ones. A majority of the company has enjoyed the basic interface it offers, the apps it has for iPhone and Blackberry, the mobility of updating a project without needing to be connected to any type of server. There are still improvements that can be made in future releases but as the person who originally purchased the solution for our company, I have found it to be an excellently priced solution in the functionality it offers.

In my line of work, PDS Vista doesn't fit. I recruit and manager talent pipelines, as well as all onboarding aspects of 11 companies. I spend more hours getting data configured and searching for information within this software than I spend with my candidates. Theres an abundance duplication, and there isn't a single stream of information shared across screens. I have to input the SAME details into several screens for them to match up. Nothing is intuitive, and its certainly not end user friendly

Incentivized

Zoho Projects is an easy project management tool to use. It provides all the functionality that we required for handling projects. We can easily create personal forms for projects and tasks, allowing us to add and report on our own desire. Apart from this we can create and edit documents in real time which saves our time. This allows us to share text docs, presentations, tables with the whole team and we can work on them together

Incentivized

Has not been down to my knowledge.

Speed meets my expectations.

PDS has excellent customer service and support. We get answers to the
majority of our questions and problems quickly, within the day that we
call. More complex issues that may require PDS’ technical support are
usually addressed within a few days

Although it might lack intuitiveness, once you get a hang of how Zoho Projects works, you can do a LOT. The impact good project management has on profitability is huge, and it has helped not only improve communication and coordination when working on a project, but more importantly have adequate tracking of time, due dates and potential bottle necks

Incentivized

The resources and online tools that PDS provide are extremely thorough and helpful in our training and learning.

Ask lots of questions, ensure you fully understand the functionality (particularly history records) and train, train, train the users for correct and complete utilization of the system.

We had multiple vendors come and demo their products/systems for us. Each one had great features but at the end of the day, based on what the Vista HRMS system had to offer and how we were able to personalize the system to meet our needs we felt the choice was simple and we havent looked back since.

Zoho Projects provides a more limited set of functionality and customization options than other task/bug trackers on the market, but what it lacks in functionality it makes up for in ease of use. It probably has 80-90% of the features of its competitors but takes about a third of the time to get up and running and realizing value.

Incentivized

• Vista HRMS offers a very reasonably priced solution that performs the functions we need for our business.
• With a very small IT staff we successfully implemented all modules of Vista HRMS in approx. 6 months from start of implementation. Compared to other projects the cost to implement this system was very cost effective.
• We have been able to maintain our internal benefits, payroll & HR functions in-house with no additional staff at a significantly reduced annual maintenance cost.

• Unfortunately, prior to creating Project Task Templates we'd occasionally miss a step and something that was necessary would be overlooked.
• The creation of the Project Templates was a team collaborative effort to make sure that everyone had some input as different people was integral to specific projects.
• It took a little while to learn some of the more tricked out features like task dependency but even starting out with the most basic of features was very significant.

Incentivized