UPDATE 01/11/12
I apologize for an error stated originally in this blog. I incorrectly stated that the Deltek Cobra integration wizard with Primavera does not support Primavera P6 after version 6.2.1. Deltek Cobra does in fact support integrating with Primavera P6 up to and including version 7. Furthermore, Deltek is committed to supporting the integration of Cobra and Primavera P6 in future releases.
I have now changed this blog removing the previous errors.
I’m increasingly running to the question, “does Deltek Cobra 5 integrate with Oracle’s Primavera P6 version 8?” The inadequate answer is “sort of”. It’s a two part issue.
The Deltek Cobra integration wizard is broken into two parts when it comes to connections with Primavera P6. Firstly there’s the Connection Properties group box (shown below) in the Edit Connection dialog that uses a straightforward ODBC connection to link in with the P6 database.
This part dials into the database and generates the Schedule Project Lookup list in the subsequent Project Selection dialog (shown below).
However, the critical part for integration with Primavera P6 lies in the ability to load time-phased data via the P6 API portion of the Edit Connection dialog. And this is where it gets troubling. For the initial baseline integration, you really need time-phase data access. It’s very time consuming and error prone to attempt this manually. You can do it with just the ODBC portion, but all your work packages will have their resource costs spread flat, which likely isn’t reflecting the profile of the now (not so integrated) master schedule.
I’ve tested this with Primavera P6 revision 8.1 but currently the P6 API for version 8.x isn’t supported. Clearly Oracle has made changes to the API and Cobra cannot connect to the more recent versions of the Primavera P6 API.
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For more Primavera P6 articles click here