Zoho Projects distinguishes between several types of users, and understanding this structure makes managing access across your organisation and its projects considerably easier.
Portal Users vs. Project Users
- Portal-level users work across multiple projects within your organisation's portal.
- Project-level users are scoped to specific individual projects rather than the whole portal.
Client Users: A Separate Category
Beyond portal and project users, Zoho Projects also supports Client Users, external people your team works for rather than internal staff. Like portal and project users, clients can be added at the portal level (seeing milestones, task lists, and bugs flagged as external across every project) or the project level (limited to just one project's externally flagged items). This is useful for keeping clients informed on progress without giving them full internal visibility.
Adding a Portal User
- Log in to Zoho Projects as an administrator.
- Go to the Users section.
- Choose an existing user, or create a completely new one if you still have licences available.
- Send the invitation. The new user must accept it via email before they can access the portal.
Adding a User to a Specific Project
- Navigate to the relevant project and click Users in the top navigation.
- Click Add Users.
- Select an existing portal user from the Portal Users tab, or use Invite User to bring in someone new.
Note: Users with the Admin profile are automatically added to every project by default. Everyone else (other than the portal owner) must be explicitly added to a project before they can be assigned tasks or issues within it.
Customising a User's Profile per Project
A user's profile and permissions can be changed for a specific project without affecting their organisation-wide profile. From the project's Users section, select the Project Profile column against the relevant user's name to adjust their permissions just for that project.
Other Management Options
- Deactivating users instead of deleting them, to preserve their historical activity while removing active access.
- Bulk rate updates for portal users, useful when adjusting billing rates across several people at once.
- Exporting your user list for reporting or auditing purposes.
- Customising visible tabs separately for project users and client users, controlling what each group sees.
Need help? 1 Cloud Consultants can help you design a user and permissions structure in Zoho Projects that fits how your teams and clients actually work together.
Book a discovery call with 1 Cloud Consultants.