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
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
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
