This just in…
Today sees the arrival of the first “on premises” Primavera P6 release for 2017 from our friends at Oracle. Officially this is Primavera P6 Version 17.7, wait 17.7? “Huh – what happened to the other six?” we hear you ask. Well, there’s been a subtle change in the naming convention: instead of this being 17.1, the ‘1’ indicating the quantity of releases for the year (this being the first of course), the 7 represents the month of release – in this case July.
The Primavera P6 cloud version has been getting monthly updates since the beginning of this year, so users of that system have enjoyed version 17.1 – 17.7 so far.
As you would expect, these releases are bringing new features and functions online, particularly in the Primavera P6 EPPM web version.
So What’s in Primavera P6 Version 17.7?
You’ll probably be very pleased to hear that many more pages have been rewritten in HTML5 and some new ones are now offered as well. This is excellent news because these pages don’t use the Java plugin and are therefore way more responsive and easier to maintain. Over the last six months worth of releases, the new and updated pages breakout like this:
Pages Updated to HTML5 in P6 17.7
- Activity Network (Including Trace Logic)
- Print and Print Preview
- Document Viewer
HTML5 Page added in P6 17.6
- Assignments page (this includes resource allocation analysis)
Pages updated to HTML5 in Primavera P6 version 17.5
- Capacity Planning (scenarios not available in the new standard view)
- Import/Export from the Activities page. This enhancement to the Activities page also allows Classic (Java) and Standard (HTML5) views to be exported and then imported as Standard user views.
Updated to HTML5 in version 17.4
- Manage Portfolios
- Open Portfolios
- And enhance in the same release:
- Add WBS Notes, including their activities on the Activities page
- Add columns for Project, WBS, and Activity UDFs on the Resource Assignments page
Updated to HTML5 in version 17.3
- View calendar: EPS, Activities, Resource Assignments, and Resource Administration pages
- Dashboards: My Issues Portlet
- New Administration tab (this appears to the right of the Reports tab)
Updated to HTML5 in version 17.2
- Global and Project Schedule Services have been updated to HTML5 and streamlined into a single page (available from the Administer menu)
- Dashboards: Customize Dashboard Pickers, My Calendar Portlet
- Status Updates: this page added to the new Approvals section, along with the Timesheet approvals
- My Preferences
Enhanced Pages in this release include:
- The Resource Assignment page to support multiple views
- The EPS page now includes Global Search and Replace
Updated to HTML5 in version 17.1
- User Interface Views
- Update Existing Users from LDAP
And the following existing page enhancements include:
- Duration and project UDF values roll up (for example to the EPS or WBS levels)
- Move Left and Move Right options are available, to reposition an item in the WBS, EPS or other hierarchy
- Interval-based grouping has been added
Other Enhancements
With all this HTML5 being added, there is now the option to Enable or Disable applets so you can basically remove the Java based pages for selected users. As the pages are enhanced and more and more of the Java based functionality is removed, this will become an extremely valuable feature.
Primavera P6 Professional
As of today there wasn’t any ‘New Features’ documentation for our dear old friend Primavera P6 Professional. However, there is a software release included in the Primavera P6 version 17.7 media – so we installed it and took a look round to see if anything had changed.
Above: nope – nothing to see here folks, move along.
It was a real quick look around admittedly, but other than the version number in the window header, we couldn’t find any significant changes in the professional client: which is probably a good thing right: hence the lack of documentation. If we discover anything going forward we’ll be sharing this with you.
What Next?
Users of the Primavera P6 Cloud will continue to enjoy monthly updates as Oracle Primavera makes ongoing enhancements to the web based P6 EPPM system. As for the ‘on premises’ versions, these will continue to roll out twice a year for now; so we may see a version 17 near the end of this year.
We’ll continue looking into this new version and bring you more news as we get it.