New Release 8.3 of Primavera Professional

The exciting news this week is that the long-awaited Primavera P6 R8.3 update is now available. This release includes updates for the Primavera P6 Professional client.

Starting with Primavera P6 Professional, very little about the client has changed from a visual perspective; always a good thing for existing users. What has been introduced is a new tool called the Primavera P6 Professional Visualizer: an attractive interface tool that brings together the original TimeScale Logic Diagram (TSLD) functions and a basic Gantt chart viewing tool. The Visualizer is an additional desktop application that can be launched from the P6 Professional Tools menu or from your Windows Start menu. Because it connects to the database directly you don’t have to have P6 Professional running to use it.

See here tutorial from Tensix in video.

Another new item is a Discussion tab in the Activity Details. This allows users to communicate via the software by posting comments against particular activities in the project.

Other features include XML import/export improvements addressing one-to-one matching of data items exported in XML formats to those of the original XER formats. Users can now exchange XML project files with users of earlier version of Primavera P6 going back to P6 R6.2 SP4.

The IPMR Data Item Description (DID), number DI-MGMT-81861 went into effect on July 1st, 2012 and part of this calls for a specific UN/CEFACT (XML) software-neutral export format for the IMPR Format 7.

For government contractors, this format is now available to Primavera P6 R8.3 users via the Export Format dialog as shown above.

Further items of note are the options to load or not load the project summary data upon startup of Primavera P6 and the option to use either online help or local help.