Archive For June 22, 2013

P6 Training in 4 Countries in 4 Days

WorldThis week Primavera Scheduling trained clients in four countries in four days. We started with clients in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and finally, Abu Dhabi. These were all live online Primavera P6 training sessions. We try very hard to accommodate clients anywhere in the world. More importantly, we are probably the only Primavera training firm that provides live training on demand. Need online P6 training right away? Call us! We do not make you wait a month or more for a class to be scheduled. If you do not see a class on our calendars that meets your needs please call us and we will make every effort to meet your schedule.

We will also throw down this challenge: call any other Primavera training firm on a weekend and see if they answer the phone! Not only do we answer the phone, we train on weekends.

While we are currently developing a video P6 training series we will always offer live online training as another option. Being able to ask the instructor questions or spend more time on one subject or another are clear advantages over videos. Of course, we have many in-person sessions as well. Please call us for more details – any day of the week!

The Missing Version of Primavera P6

Oracle appears to have killed off Release 7.0 of Primavera P6. The questions is, why? Those of you who have downloaded Primavera software from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud are probably aware of the existence of older Primavera programs that are no longer sold  – P3 and SureTrak in particular. The purpose, as we understand, is to support licensed users who may need to reinstall these programs. Oracle grants a perpetual license for each program, so this makes sense. Yet Release 7.0 has recently been dropped from Oracle’s eDelivery site. Release 7.0 was the first version released after Oracle purchased Primavera.  We have always liked this version because its user interface is a little simpler to learn and the program is less likely to crash than some of the newer releases.

Release 8.1 has been dropped as well, but this seems like much less of an issue. The differences between Releases 8.1 and 8.2 are so minor that most users would never notice them. But Release 7.0 is much different that the R8 series and it would seem likely that some users would want to continue using this older version. We know of one major construction company with over a $1B in annual revenue that has standardized on Release 7.0 so clearly it is not considered to be an inferior program. Oracle stopped using serial numbers with R7.0 so in theory the software could be copied from one computer to another, but whether this is considered legal is another matter.

Primavera Scheduling now recommends that users purchase Release 8.3 to avoid any licensing issues in the future. Our initial testing of R8.3 suggests that is more stable than R8.2 and besides, we do not have too many other choices! Either we purchase R8.2 or R8.3 or we buy something else. Primavera P6 is dominant scheduling program in the United States so there is really no incentive to switch. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions regarding which version of Primavera to purchase.