After the spate of recent conferences and events, the Oracle Primavera folks have been discussing their roadmap for Primavera P6. While it’s not uncommon for product roadmaps to span multiple years, they also seem to get more vague the further out in time you go. So with that in mind, we’ve focused here on the next release of Primavera P6….R8.4.
Primavera P6 R8.4 is planned for release in the fall of this year and has some quite useful capabilities being added. Listed below are some of the highlights and note that they are in no particular order.
Ease Of use
Quite a few minor annoyances are being addressed in Primavera P6 R8.4 particularly under the ease of use category. Here are a few:
- When assigning a resource to task, you will be able to search on resources by other attributes e.g. role.
- Summarizing projects will be visually displayed on the EPS.
- One of our favorites is the ability to see which users are logged in to Primavera P6 EPPM at any point in time.
Team Member
Team Member will now include Progress Reporter and wait for it….it will not be using Java anymore. This will mean that there will be just one statusing tool, whether you want to update activity status or complete a time sheet.
- Oracle will also be adding the capability to update other resource types including materials, equipment, etc.
- You will be able to take pictures and add them to a task when statusing allowing field users to show the central office exactly what’s been accomplished.
- The sorting and filtering capabilities in Team Member will be enhanced offering more flexibility and options.
Did I say also no Java in Team Member already!
Primavera Visualizer
Primavera Visualizer will gain some useful enhancements including:
- Adding legend into header and footer as opposed to being separate block.
- The option of turning on and off the grid lines.
- Other enhancements and improvements to the way you manage layouts with multiple selects.
We can also expect other minor improvements to Primavera visualizer.
Primavera P6 Professional
The big news here is the database. Many folks have found the Oracle XE database that ships with Primavera P6 Professional to be overly complex and difficult to troubleshoot if there’s a problem. With the Primavera P6 R8.4 release, we will see Oracle moving away from Oracle XE and on to SQL Lite. Note: this is for standalone installations. This move provides the same capabilities but offers a much simpler platform for end users.
Adding functionality around configuration management – e.g. moving from test environment to production R8.4 will, using Gateway, enable you to select what data moves over, e.g. global data calendars and codes. More will added in future releases.
Primavera P6 EPPM
Oracle is adding some additional background services. You will be able to add update baseline and import/export as services that will run in the background.
Integration with Unifier
We can expect that the integration with Primavera Unifier to get tighter offering the ability to link projects.
Summary
There you have it. Any seasoned user will recognize these features and enhancements as being customer driven requests that address common complaints. We are excited about this next release and can’t wait to get our hands on it for a more in-depth look!
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