Oracle Primavera PPM Solution

Primavera is Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Suite from Oracle used for Project Forecasting and long term decision making.  

I get a chance to look and work with this product and find it very much interesting and excited product. It has following modules

Client Modules

1.      Project Management Module

              This module is use for project and resource management 

2.      Time Sheet Application

TimeSheets enables Web based team communication and time keeping for projects and tasks. 

3.      Methodology Management

This module stores methodologies of authoring or storing as templates for new projects. Organizations can gather its best practices and they can be used further.

Server Components \ Modules

Primavera has two main server components

1.      Relational Database Management System

RDBMS stores every project and project methodologies related data into a separate central database server. Normally it requires two databases Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server or SQL Server Express. I’ll not go into the details here. Details can be found on following link

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17462_01/Product_Manuals/adminguide.pdf

2.      Group Server

Group Server is a Windows 2003/2008 service that runs on your Web Server (e.g. IIS) and it allows clients to download Timesheets from that sever using Web browsers.

Group server is necessary if you’re planning to use Time sheets module which is a client module.

It acts as an intermediary between TimeSheets client and project management database

Additional Components \ Modules

Following are few additional components that can be used with Primavera. These are all optional modules but if you use them you’ll actually be expanding the functionality of Primavera solution.

1.      P6 Web Access  

P6 Web Access was previously also known as “myPrimavera” or “Primavera’s Web Application” but its new name is now P6 Web Access.

This provides project analysis, portfolio and resource information across the organization and allows users to access project management data over the internet (locally hosted application).

It has Dashboard which can be customized or personalized at user level. Filters can be applied on project related data so that only relevant users and roles can access respective data.

For further details information can be attained from following link

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17462_01/Product_Manuals/adminguide.pdf

2.      Distributed Job Service

It is a Windows 2003/2008 service which runs a job at a preconfigured interval on project data. These jobs are created by users in Project Management Module.

3.      Project Link

Additionally we also have plugin for Primavera so that Microsoft Project users to work in MSP environment while being connected to Primavera’s enterprise features.

4.      Software Development Kit (SDK)

SDK provides us the facility to integrate the data between Primavera and any external system (database or application). SDK provides access to the schema and to business logic.  SDK can be installed on any machine that needs to integrate with Primavera database.  It supports following things

Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard

ODBC-Compliant interfaces (OLE DB) for connecting to the project management database