As we say goodbye to 2016, we get to greet a new version of Deltek Cobra for the new year. Deltek Cobra 8.1.
This new release builds on all the great things that Deltek did when they released the first Cobra 8 back in June of 2016 along with the new 8.0 family of IPM products. The user interaction indeed improved with 8.0 and things just got even better. Check it out folks:
Saving and Sharing Views
The most exciting feature improvement is that Deltek Cobra 8.1 now has the ability to save and share views. As many of you already know, previous versions of Deltek Cobra have saved views by user, by project with no ability to reuse the layout of columns from project to project. This was rather frustrating and prevented the user from having a default or ‘go-to’ view they could create.
Now of course, you can do just that with a named view, and what’s more share it with other users on the system. The views save the open columns and their order, any filters being used, sorting of data in columns and whether or not the Show Assignments table is open. This is really, really great news and worth the upgrade for that feature alone.
Direct Database Table Integration for Actual Costs
And it just keeps on getting better as Deltek have been listening to their customers and creating some other really great enhancements. For example, Deltek Cobra now offers direct table integration for Actual costs, so the integration wizard can be connected to a specific table in a database in order to extract actual cost data. This avoids the necessity to use less secure spreadsheet or CSV files to load actual cost that may be secure or proprietary in some organizations.
Some customers have been looking for a more secure way to load actuals and this new capability provides the added security they have been looking for.
Element of Cost
The Resources file offers a new Element of Cost field. This field will be used for Reporting and also in the wInsight and Acumen integrations. It works much like a Resource Code field but is prebuilt. This saves customers having to build an Element of Cost field using the Resource Codes feature. The categories are Labor, Material, Other Direct Costs and Subcontractor. These are a non-configurable list.
Updated Support for Scheduling Tools
There are updates in supported versions of third party scheduling tools, namely MS Project Professional and Server 2016 and Primavera P6 16.1.
Tighter Integration with Acumen and wInsight
The version also introduces tighter integration with Acumen and wInsight Analytics. This export of Deltek Cobra Cost Data to Acumen has been done to serve the growing requirements for Data Driven Metrics.
Shared Security with wInsight
Shared security with wInsight, meaning the users and groups created in Cobra will be exported to the wInsight database. This is implemented in Deltek Cobra 8.1. It will also be supported in wInsight when Deltek release version wInsight 8.1 later this year.
Deltek Cobra 8.1 Summary
This is an exciting upgrade and has delivered on the promises made for this release back in June when the first new generation of Deltek Cobra was rolled out. So far we’ve found it to be stable and definitely a joy to use, particularly with the new view saving and sharing capabilities. In short, a really nice piece of work by Deltek has been delivered here. We anticipate the user base will be delighted with the new capabilities.