You’ll often hear the suite of Primavera Project Management software described in a variety of ways like ‘P6 Power Client’, ‘P6 Windows Professional’, ‘P6 PPM’, ‘P6 Standalone’, ‘P6 Web’ or even ‘P6 EPPM’. In this edition we recap on the differences between P6 Professional and P6 Web.
PRIMAVERA P6 WEB AND P6 PROFESSIONAL
Over the years, Primavera has been adopted as the recognised standard in numerous industries worldwide to manage complex and capital intensive projects. Oracle Primavera’s project management software has gone through many changes and revision updates. Primavera P6 was expanded from its original Windows platform to offer an additional internet based version which is now referred to as Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management (EPPM).
What is Primavera P6 Professional?
Oracle Primavera P6 Professional Project Management (PPM) is more commonly known as ‘P6 Windows Client’, or it can also be referred to as the ‘Windows Client’, ‘Optional Client’ or even ‘P6 Standalone’. We usually refer to it as ‘P6 Professional’.
P6 Professional was designed to be scalable to manage large-scale, sophisticated projects on an enterprise wide database. It was referred to as the ‘power client’ because it enabled ‘power users’ such as planners, schedulers and project managers to organise, manage and control projects with upwards of 100,000 activities. P6 Professional was the perfect tool for these ‘power users’ to plan, create, schedule, execute and deliver their projects on time and within budget.
One advantage of P6 Professional is that projects can be worked on in ‘exclusive mode’ or can be ‘checked-out’ so that project managers can work on a project independently on their computer. Others will still be able to look at the project in ‘read-only’ mode and won’t be able to make any changes until the project manager checks the project in to merge it back into the database. For example, a project manager can ‘check-out’ a project, go on site in the field where they won’t have access to the company’s network/database, then make updates to the schedule. When the project manager is re-connected to the company’s network/database, they can merge the updated project back into the database.
- The P6 Professional client can be purchased separately under the product name ‘Primavera P6 Professional Project Management’.
- Or it comes bundled with the Primavera P6 EPPM licence (which includes both P6 Windows and P6 Web as we’ll address shortly).
Features of P6 Professional:
- Support of work breakdown structures (WBS), user-defined fields and codes, critical-path-method (CPM) scheduling, and resource levelling.
- Multiple users can access the same projects concurrently.
- Issue tracking.
- Management by threshold.
- A tracking feature that enables you to perform dynamic cross-project rollups of cost, schedule, and earned value.
- Work products and documents that can be assigned to activities and managed centrally.
- Time-scaled Logic Diagrams (in particular ‘P6 Visualizer’).
- Resource and role administration.
- A report wizard that creates customised reports to extract any data from the P6 EPPM database.
- Tiled and tabbed window layouts for easy navigation.
- Configurable menus and toolbars.
- Enhanced page breaks on grouping bands.
- Email reports as attachments.
- Streamlined installation process.
What is Primavera P6 Web?
Primavera P6 Web is Oracle Primavera’s project management tool with a web browser interface. All you need is internet access and a web browser to plan, schedule and manage projects. This allows project teams to have ‘anytime, anywhere access’ to project information through the flexible web based user interface.
P6 Web features not only the planning and scheduling project management aspects that people are familiar with from the P6 Professional Client, it also has highly customisable graphical interface dashboards and portlets that allow users to view both individual projects and a portfolio of projects. P6 Web allows executives to analyse groups of projects (portfolios) for high level planning, such as resource capacity planning, risk, and budgetary planning.
P6 Web is part of a broader product offering from Oracle, called Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, or EPPM for short.
Primavera P6 EPPM comes pre-bundled as a product suite that includes:
- P6 Professional for EPPM.
- P6 Web.
- P6 Team Member Application.
- P6 Progress Reporter.
- P6 Integration API.
- P6 EPPM Web Services.
Both P6 Professional and P6 Web access the same enterprise database of projects.
Why is this significant? It means that power users or advanced planners and schedulers can still use P6 Professional for their projects. At the same time, executives, managers and project managers can conduct higher level planning, resourcing, portfolio management, administration and team collaboration all through P6 Web.
Administrative Features of P6 EPPM:
All administrative and most enterprise-level tasks for the P6 Professional Client exist in the P6 EPPM database, and are accessed through P6 Web.
Administrative features relocated from P6 Professional to P6 Web are:
Global Dictionaries, including EPS, OBS, Project Codes, Activity Step Templates, Cost Accounts, Funding Sources, Risk User Defined Fields.- Users.
- Security Profiles.
- Admin Preferences.
- Admin Categories.
- Currencies.
- Timesheet Dates.
- Financial Periods.
- Time Approval.
- Job Services – replaced with Scheduled Services.
- Project Risks – replaced with Risks.
- Methodology Manager Module – replaced with Project Templates.
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