I’ve not been announcing many Deltek Cobra hotfix releases lately, largely due to bandwidth issues on my part; however, I thought I should bring a few goodies into the spotlight as they’ve been kicking my butt out in the field. And today I discovered that one defect in particular has been fixed, even though I can’t find mention of it in any of the release notes posted since I reported it. That’s a bit like finding a forgotten $20 bill in your winter jacket pocket.
Microsoft Project Milestones
Let’s start with the one that’s been giving me a sore behind since the regulatory release at the back end of last year: specifically an issue whereby milestones did not come over during integration with a Microsoft Project XML file.
This one came to light during a large Deltek Cobra class I was teaching just after the regulatory release came out back in January of this year. Some of the students were using pre-regulatory release builds of Cobra, and a few poor souls in the class were using a later post-regulatory build. Now I should say at this point that the Ten Six Cobra 5.1 fundamentals course that I teach takes the students through the entire setup, build, IMS integration, update status and reporting processes that are typical of an EVMS implementation. The side effect of this is that the class exercises also function as a fairly comprehensive end-to-end test of the systems overall features. Anyway, the moment we all clicked the button to load project data from the Microsoft Project XML file, about half the attendees complained that the process had horribly failed. As I’d been using the same data files without issue for a couple of years, I suspected that this was a bug of some kind. It didn’t take long to figure out that the post regulatory versions of Deltek Cobra were the common cause.
This was reported to Deltek support and at some point they fixed the problem. I ran a test today using HotFix#09, build 5.01.1596 and had no issues loading and later updating the status of milestones using this version. Awesome – they’ve fixed it. Prior to this release any customer with an IPMR reporting requirement that was using milestones in a Microsoft Project schedule was S.O.L.
Recalc Fix
Another fix that came to my attention recently during another training class was an issue with the Recalc feature. If you had similarly named resources such as ENG01, ENG02, ENG03, Recalc would use the wrong rates on some of these and skew your BAC, EAC or whatever it was that you were recalculating. This fix did appear in the HotFix#09 Release Notes and was a huge relief to one of my fellow Cobra guys who’s been wrestling with it for some time.
Hotfix#10 just Released
Hotfix #10 was released on December 13th 2013 as build number 5.01.1675 and among many other items allows you to connect with the Primavera P6 R8.3 integration API. Prior to this release you needed to insert some additional lines of XML code into the P3eAPIClasses.xml file to get it working.
Summary
In summary it seems that Deltek Cobra 5.1 is at last returning to her former pre-regulatory release state and I’m finding fewer major issues now than in the early months following the IPMR changes. It’s been a difficult year with a lot of workarounds being used, but I’m feeling more positive about the tool as we roll out of 2013. Deltek have been working hard this year and have kept a steady stream of fixes coming out that have eroded many of my customer’s concerns. Now I feel a lot more comfortable suggesting that you check out and test Hotfix#10 after perusing the release notes. The cumulative fixes may address some items you may have been working around over the last few months.
Happy Holidays
As this may be my last blog for 2013, I want to thank you all for your continued support and wish you all a very happy, safe and enjoyable holiday season followed by a prosperous and relatively bug-free new year.
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