What is the Difference between Primavera P6 Windows vs. P6 Web?
Written on . By CPM Solutions
You’ll often hear a few buzz words in the Primavera Project Management community like ‘P6 Power client’ or ‘P6 Windows Professional’ or ‘P6 Web’ or even ‘EPPM’. What does that all mean?Back in the early 80’s, Primavera had developed an enterprise project portfolio management tool. Over the years, Primavera has been adopted as the recognized standard in numerous industries worldwide to manage their complex and capital intensive projects. Oracle Primavera’s project management software has gone through many changes and revision updates. Primavera P6 was also expanded from its original Microsoft Windows Platform to offer an additional internet based version.
What is Primavera P6 Windows Professional? P6 Professional Project Management (PPM) is more commonly known as P6 Windows client, or can be referred to as the ‘always-connected Windows client’, ‘optional client’ or even ‘power client’.
Since its introduction, P6 Windows 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 organize, manage and control projects with upwards of 100,000 activities. P6 Windows is the perfect tool for these ‘power users’ to plan, create, schedule and execute and deliver their projects on time and within budget.
One advantage the ‘always-connected Windows client’ is that projects can be worked on in “exclusive mode” or 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 he/she won’t have access to the company’s network/database, then make updates to the schedule. When the project manager is re-connected back to the company’s network/database, he/she can merge the updated project back into the database.- The P6 Windows client can be purchased separately under the product name ‘P6 Professional Project Management’
- Or it is bundled with the P6 EPPM license (includes both P6 Windows and P6 Web Access)
- Latest version is Release 8.2
- Support of work breakdown structures (WBS), user-defined fields and codes, critical-path-method (CPM) scheduling, and resource leveling.
- 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
- Resource and role administration
- A Report wizard that helps you create customized reports to extract any data from the P6 EPPM database
- Tiled & tabbed window layouts for easy navigation
- Configurable menus & toolbars
- Enhanced page breaks on grouping bands
- Email reports as attachments
- Streamlined installation process
- P6 Windows Client for EPPM
- P6 Web Access
- P6 Team Member Application
- P6 Progress Reporter
- P6 Integration API
- P6 EPPM Web Services
- Why is this significant? It means that the power users or advanced planners and schedulers can still use P6 Windows client 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 the P6 Web client.