Sometimes you don’t realize how good something is until you don’t have access to it. This is true in many walks of life, but today I want to talk about Deltek Cobra release 8.2. Just when you think it can’t get any better, they find a way to improve the tool. At the bottom of page 24 in the release notes for Deltek Cobra 8.2 GA (General Availability), it announced the “Ability to Find Data in the Project View without Expanding the Records”.
So when I’m back here in The Cobra Guy workshop, I am of course using the latest version of Deltek Cobra. I’m enjoying all the goodies said version has to offer, the aforementioned ‘Find’ feature to boot. But when I’m on customer site, I was working on a very large project. I was using in a somewhat older version of Cobra 8.0. The sudden inability to do a find on collapsed records was excruciating.
As you may recall, one productivity enhancement that was introduced with the first version of the Deltek Cobra 8 family was when you click on the ++ Expand All button, it only expands the Control Account that are visible in the current table area. This was done to prevent a long wait time while Cobra was busy opening every single control account. This was a lesson learned from version 5.x customers who had some very large projects.
However, this did have the side affect of preventing the Find feature working effectively. If you didn’t happen to have the record you were looking for expended, the search would report no results. Now you’re running an eyeball down every project row in search of your desired work package. One efficiency had put the kibosh on another.
The good new is, Deltek have closed the loop on this issue with the release of version 8.2 and the world is good again. I can search on a collapsed record and find the values therein. These are two efficiencies that now compliment each other instead of being at odds. Always a good thing. Nice job guys.
Just one other point about searches that is worthy of note. The search dialog now lets you select from a pick list when you are searching the Progress Technique and Status columns.
Now if I can just convince that dear customer to upgrade their Cobra instance to Deltek Cobra 8.2!