Primavera P6 v15.2 - Java Components Almost Gone

Over the last few years we have all been struggling with the applets in Primavera P6. Struggling might be an understatement if you are like me and you felt like you never knew what was going to happen when you opened your P6-EPPM web version. With browsers getting tougher on Java applets and Chrome not supporting them, this was becoming a bit of a nightmare for many IT teams supporting P6-EPPM. At Emerald I was lucky to have our tech team right with me, and when I would HipChat Dan “HELP, I don’t know what I did… but P6-EPPM is not working” he knew what was coming next.

You will all be happy to know that Primavera P6 v15.2 has really made some progress on removing the applets. They are not all gone, but several are, on the admin side as well as the user side.

Admin Applets

On the admin side, one of the most problematic windows was the Application Settings window. I am not sure why this one was always such a pain, but it was always the one that would break on any Java upgrade. In the latest version, you will see a very different look and feel to this window. I would say they are not as elegant, but they are growing on me and work very well. You will also notice in this screen grab that several of the key fields’ lengths have also been expanded or increased over the years, which bring a lot of new flexibility to our clients on some of their use cases and integration requirements.

User Applets

From a user perspective some additional P6-EPPM applets have been swapped over to HTML. An example is the project selection window. This window now allows a user an enhanced search option as well as an improved activity view to help select the projects they want to open. The toggle between projects and templates is also a very nice addition to this window.

The Next P6-EPPM Version 16.1

With Oracle Primavera’s commitment to 2 new P6-EPPM releases per year, we are looking for big things from release P6-EPPM 16.1 which will likely be in conjunction with Collaborate 2016 in April.

Can’t Upgrade – but need a solution?

If your team is not in a position to make the upgrade to P6-EPPM v15.2 in the near term, all is not hopeless. Emerald has been working with solutions to support our clients that are in IT change freeze or in the middle of a large project and contractually cannot perform any upgrades. For these clients, we have been working with tools that are HTML5 RDP Client compliant. For us non-techies, this means that it switches the Java applets into HTML5 or non-applets so that you do not have Java issues.