Spring is in the air, which means another release of Primavera P6 Professional Project Management (PPM) and Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM).
The list of changes to Primavera P6 Professional is short, but sweet. First, after years of begging, Oracle has finally introduced a feature that has long been part of Microsoft Project: the ability to show the relationship type and lag in the Activity Table. Yes! Previously, this information was only available in a tabular Report or by exporting to Microsoft Excel. Now we can finally show this level of detail in a graphical setting. These are new columns called Predecessor Details and Successor Details, as seen below:
Second, Claim Digger has been moved to Visualizer and is now called Schedule Comparison. I suspect this was done to avoid the problem of running Claim Digger with the SQLite database. This type of database does not support third-party applications like Claim Digger, which is an important tool for many Primavera users. Rather than wait for SQLite to change its spots, Oracle apparently decided to take a more proactive stance.
Quite a few enhancements have been added to Primavera P6 EPPM to improve performance and to bring it more into line with Primavera P6 Professional:
- Advanced HTML5 Activity and EPS Views
- Basic HTML5 Resource Assignment View
- Additional copy project options
- Daily Timescale in Team Usage View
- Additional Global Search & Replace functionality
- Streamlined installation and management of the P6 Pro application with the removal of JRE
One of the new copy project options is the ability to copy projects that are linked to other projects but not copy those (external) relationships. Previously, we could only choose to not copy external relationships when copying one or more activities. Now this option can be applied to the entire project.
HTML5 pages load faster than the Java-based applets that were originally used in Primavera P6 EPPM and do not require plugins. The HTML5-based pages are referred to as Basic View, but users have the option of viewing the Java-based pages in Classic View.
Relationship types and lags can also be shown in the Activity Table in Primavera P6 EPPM.
Additional information regarding these enhancements can be found here. In addition, Oracle has created a very nifty app called the Cumulative Feature Overview Tool. It is sort of like Claim Digger for analyzing different versions of Primavera P6. You input which version you are currently using and the tool will tell you what features have been added since then, and when the changes were introduced. Click here to access the Cumulative Feature Overview Tool.