While many of us are still trying to use up the leftover turkey and polish off the last of the eggnog, the folks at Oracle Primavera have been busy preparing for an interesting start to the New Year. Tuesday, 27th December saw the release of Primavera P6 R8.2 and this promises to be an exciting version.
Release 8.2 offers lots of new features and many welcome enhancements to the Primavera P6 EPPM (web client) and Primavera P6 Professional client. We’ll give you the highlights in this article and for a detailed look at what’s new in 8.2, you can download copies of the Oracle Primavera “What’s New” documents from the Oracle e-delivery website.
Primavera P6 EPPM 8.2
New features:
Team Member Web Application – this new tool provides the ability to update activities, steps and related activity statuses without the team member having to learn the entire Primavera P6 tool. By declaring team members as owners of activities (not necessarily assigned as resources), they can report actual start dates, actual finish dates and percent complete progress on activities, steps and related activities using a simple interface.
As we field test this over the next few months, we’ll be able to provide you with more details about how Primavera P6 Team Member can be used in real-world implementations. Up front, this does look like a promising capability that will likely prove popular with our customers and will be of particular interest to Control Account Managers working in earned value systems where good, objective progress reporting is critical.
Enhancements
Exclusive Mode – among the enhancements listed for the main Primavera P6 web client is a new Exclusive Mode, allowing you to open a project with exclusive access and prevent “last save wins” scenarios when multiple users can potentially access the same project. It even tells you who has it open exclusively.
Microsoft Project Integration– you can now update an existing Primavera P6 project from a Microsoft Project XML file allowing you to manage a project in Microsoft Project and bring the changes into Primavera P6 to maintain accurate status. Primavera P6 also now supports the new Microsoft Project 2010 version when using the import/export features.
There are also enhancements to the scaling options when printing, enhanced event functionality to trigger event messages when certain changes occur including changes to UDF values, enhanced trending and last but not least, multiple usability enhancements. These usability enhancements are numerous but some of the most interesting ones include:
- Cut/copy/paste of WBS elements in the activities view will help speed up the project data development process.
- Dissolve activities support allows you to delete an activity that is part of a chain and merge the successor and predecessor links that would otherwise be broken.
- Search for columns is now available when customizing the Activities, EPS and Assignments pages.
The installation process has also been streamlined with the new EPPM Universal Installer that allows the EPPM components to be installed using one package, rather than requiring individual installs. This is welcome news as the EPPM installation has been a continuous challenge for new customers who may not be familiar with the many components required to build the Primavera P6 web client environment.
Primavera P6 Professional 8.2
The Primavera P6 Professional client has enjoyed a few enhancements of its own, although not nearly as extensive as P6 EPPM. Nevertheless, these enhancements are very welcome and include the following:
- Microsoft Project import enhancements and 2010 XML support as described in the EPPM items above.
- New line numbering feature allows you to add line numbers to the Activity Table, Gantt Chart and Activity Usage spreadsheet.
- Installation and configuration enhancements allow you to create your Primavera P6 Professional environment in one process.
There are also a number of Timescaled Logic Diagram enhancements including new filtering, new sight lines, enhanced activity code color coding, enhanced templates, enhanced grouping and enhanced performance. You can learn more about the new capabilities and features in Primavera P6 Professional here.
For more details, click on the following link to access the e-delivery website. You’ll be looking for the following documents:
What’s New in P6 EPPM.pdf
What’s New in P6 Professional.pdf
As we start working with this new version over the next few months we will be able to provide feedback and additional articles to help you become familiar with 8.2s capabilities and benefits. We’ll also be very interested to hear your comments and views on this new version as it rolls out to the Primavera P6 community. Keep in touch folks.
For more Primavera P6 articles click here