The recent announcement from Microsoft (July 16th) that launched ‘The New Microsoft Office’ has certainly been generating a lot of interest, and a lot of questions. The question that we wanted to answer was whether or not the new Microsoft Project XML files would load into the current R8.2 version of Primavera P6.
To answer the question, we installed Microsoft Project 2013 and performed a simple import test into Primavera P6 Professional.
Prior to performing the import test, we used a file comparison tool to examine any deltas between Microsoft Project 2010’s XML and the 2013 XML formats using an identical project in both systems. There didn’t appear to be any major differences in the format or any new XML tags between the two versions.
The Test
The first step was to try the import using Primavera P6 Professional R8.2. We had already loaded one of our test projects into the preview version of Microsoft Project 2013 and saved it as a new XML file.
Using the Import function, we selected the Microsoft XML format option and selected the 2013 XML file.
We used the standard MSP Mapping template without making any changes to it.
The Import Result dialog reported a successful load.
Results for Primavera P6 Professional
The project loaded clean and the schedule dates and other attributes all appeared to be as expected. For Primavera P6 Professional, it does appear that the new 2013 XML format works as well as its 2010 predecessor without requiring updates from Oracle.
Primavera P6 EPPM
The final test was to see if the web based Primavera P6 EPPM system would also be able to import the 2013 XML format.
Results for P6 EPPM
We imported the 2013 XML file into P6 EPPM and the test project loaded successfully without warnings or errors.
Conclusion
This was just one general test of one project file to see if the new XML format would work with these existing tools. The most we can say about this is that it appears to be working in both the professional and EPPM version of Primavera P6 at this time. However, there are many factors that could render this test inaccurate or obsolete before the final version is released – estimated to be around October of this year.
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