Introducing P6 Professional

When P6 Professional is connected to a P6 EPPM database:

P6 Professional is a separate component of P6 EPPM that integrates traditional project management with streamlined resource and cost management.

It provides a set of robust features aimed primarily to address the needs of project planners and schedulers. (P6 Professional connected to a P6 EPPM database is not used to perform administrative or most enterprise-level tasks.)

P6 Professional features include the following:

• 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
• Visualizer, which allows you to create time-based Gantt and Timescaled Logic Diagram reports
• Resource and role administration
• A Report wizard that helps you create customized reports to extract any data from the P6 EPPM database

When P6 Professional is connected to a P6 Professional database:

P6 Professional is a comprehensive, multiproject planning and control software, built on Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server relational databases for enterprise-wide project management scalability. P6 Professional can stand alone for project and resource management, and it enables your organization to store and manage its projects in a central location. The module supports work breakdown structures (WBS), organizational breakdown structures (OBS), user-defined fields and codes, critical-path-method (CPM) scheduling, and resource leveling.

P6 Professional enables you to budget, prioritize, plan, administer, and manage multiple projects; optimize limited, shared resources; control changes; and consistently move projects to on-time and on-budget completion. It provides customizable interfaces, scalable and flexible tools, and easy integration with project management software outside of the P6 suite, including Oracle Contractor, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Excel.

P6 Professional provides

• An enterprise project structure (EPS), which enables project managers to manage multiple projects, from the highest levels of the organization to the individuals that perform specific project tasks. Multiple users can access the same projects concurrently.
• Integrated risk management
• 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
• Visualizer, which allows you to create time-based Gantt and Timescaled Logic Diagram reports
• Resource and role administration
• A Report wizard that helps you create customized reports to extract any data from the P6 Professional database

About P6 Professional Standalone

P6 Professional Standalone uses a P6 Pro Standalone (SQLite) database connection running on a SQLite database. A standalone implementation supports all of the Project Management functionality of P6 Professional except for the following:

• Update baseline
• Job Services – Jobs cannot be scheduled.  However, the user can use the Windows scheduler to invoke the command-line interface to import, export, and run batch reports.
• Risk Analysis
• Any existing Java-based integration components developed by the customer using the P6 Remote Integration API (RMI) is not supported with a SQLite database.
• Advanced XML import options

  Note: If you choose to continue to use Oracle XE database, the features listed above are retained.

Additionally, P6 Professional Standalone is single-user implementation. The only user in a P6 Professional Standalone implementation is an Admin Superuser. As a single-user implementation, any features intended for use in a multiple-user implementation are not available in P6 Professional Standalone, including:

• User administration
• Security profiles
• Email
• Project access (all projects are opened in shared mode)
• Checking out and checking in projects
• Saving or importing layouts for all users or other users

If you need a project management solution for multiple users, see the following documents to install an enterprise-wide solution:

• P6 Professional Installation and Configuration Guide (Oracle Database)
• P6 Professional Installation and Configuration Guide (Microsoft SQL Server Database)