July is turned out to be a month packed with all kinds of news that’s affecting the project and earned value industry. Monday 16th’s announcement from Microsoft that all things ‘Office’ are about to massively change got me thinking about one thing: will the new Microsoft Project 2013 integrate with Deltek Cobra?
One way to find out – test it and see what happens.
As it stands, Microsoft haven’t yet released the installable version of Office that it has semi-formally named “The New Microsoft Office”, also informally known as Office 2013 to try and save some confusion. It wouldn’t otherwise be confusing, except Steve Ballmer’s announcement talked about a whole new dimension they are calling Office 365, a subscription service to Microsoft Office that is largely cloud based and offers three different tiers for Home, Small Business and Enterprise use.
The Test
Getting back to the point, the only version I could test Cobra with right now was an online version called Microsoft Project Pro Office 365 Preview. So after wrestling with the trial signups, Windows Live ID’s and so on, I finally ran up the new version and loaded my standard test schedule into it.
I’m pleased to say that it all went without a hitch and I was quickly able to do a ‘Save As’ from MS Project 365 and generate my first 2013 formatted .XML file.
Using the Integration Wizard I loaded the new project into Cobra 5.1 build 5.01.517 (HotFix # 15). Don’t try this at home folks, I’m a trained professional.
The Results
It worked. My reliable old testing project loaded without any errors or warnings. Marvelous. Click on exhibit A below to enlarge.
Now before you get too excited about this, I should probably hazard a guess that it won’t be officially supported by Deltek until they’ve completed their testing and due diligence. However it does look like one might be able to scrape by with the status quo because supported or not, it does seem to be working.
Also note that this worked because I used a later build of Cobra, namely HotFix 15 which supports the current Microsoft Project 2010 XML format. When I tried this with the original GA release of Cobra 5.1 (build 5.01.175), it loaded without errors or warnings, but the WBS was screwed up. This is what happens sometimes when one chooses to live so dangerously.
Digging back to my propeller head days, I used a file comparison tool to look at the differences between the MS Project 2010 and 2013 XML output files and found some layout differences between the two formats. Considering I exported the identical project in each case, it’s clear that there are some changes to the XML structure.
However, it’s evidently close enough for later versions of Cobra (HotFix#12 or later) to load a good baseline program from. So despite the horrible curved ball I just pitched it, Cobra has once again knocked one clear out of the park. All we can hope for now is that Microsoft don’t make further changes to the XML format before the official release of Office 2013 – or whatever name it ends up with.
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