Upgrading P6 Professional 8.2 with Service Pack 1

Upgrading P6 Professional 8.2 with Service Pack 1


It's time for me to apply the new SP1 to P6 professional.  This came out in the fall of 2012 and is Patch 14409478, Release 8.2 SP1 (8.2.1.3763).  Information about what is in this pack can be found on support.oracle.com, then doing a search for ID number 1480818.1
From this page you can also get to the download page.

What version am I on now?

If you're not sure what version you are on, open up P6, and choose Help->About to get the following screen:








     

 The upgrade

The upgrade is not simple, as there is not a one-stop "upgrade.exe" file.  Instead, the upgrade consists of replacing a number of files manually and then running a script to upgrade each database you use.

1) Replace Files

First you  replace a number of files that exist on your local machine where P6 Profssional is installed.  You may first want to back up your current P6 folder.
On my local desktop, the folders where P6 is installed are found in:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Oracle\Primavera P6\P6 Professional"

Here is what the file structure there looks like:




1.A Replace PM.exe
This goes directly into the P6 Professional folder.

• P6.exe => P6 Professional

1.B Replace the 3 files starting with "OraclePrimavera..." 
Copy these into the "P6Tools" folder beneath your "P6 Professional" folder.

• OraclePrimavera.ApplicationLogic.dll    => P6 Professional/P6Tools
• OraclePrimavera.ApplicationLogic.PM.dll => P6 Professional/P6Tools
• OraclePrimavera.Core.Utils.dll          => P6 Professional/P6Tools

 1.C Replace the "prm-..." files.  These each go into different sub-folders beneath the "Pro" folder

• prm-cd.jar             => Pro/ClaimDigger
• prm-xslt.jar           => Pro/Java/lib
• prm-updatebaseline.jar => Pro/BaselineUpdate
• prm-importexport.jar   => Pro/ImportExport
• intgserver.jar         => Pro/java/lib  

1.D Replace java SDK file:

If you use the SDK, then you will need to replace PMSDK.dll in the main P6 Professional folder:

• PMSDK.ddll     => P6 Professional

2 Update database

Run dbsetup.bat




Then, using SQL Server studio or your favorite db tool, run the following script:

DBScripts\SqlServer\ss_projwbs_obsproj.sql

Then run this command:

sqlcmd -S <server name in full> -U <user name> -P <password> -d <database name> -i <file name and location>

For example:
sqlcmd -S bombur\sqlexpress -U sa -P sa -d P6_Pro_Sample -i ssppm_src.plb

This will perform many actions on the database, including updating triggers, as in the following screen:



Once you have finished, log into P6, choose Help->About and voila!  You are on the latest and greatest version of P6 Professional.


 

One annoyance I noticed after the upgrade is that the menus are once again set to only show me the most recently used menus, and hide the rest:




Personally, I do not like this. Just right-click near the menu, choose "Customize..." open the Options tab and un-check "Menus show recently used commands first".






Happy scheduling!

Changing the maximum number of activities in Oracle Primavera P6 8.2 Web

Issue: You are in Oracle Primavera P6, on the web client, and have many projects open.  When you go to view activities, you get this warning

The number of activities in this view has exceeded the administrator's limit of 5000.  You can use activity filters to manage which activities in the project to display.

In the screen below I have set the number of activities to 5 for illustrative purposes:




How do we fix this?  You need to change a setting in the administration application.  In older versions of P6 you could only change these settings by running a java program which runs on the server itself.  But in 8.2, you can do this through your web browser!

The URL you use to do this is almost the same as the URL you use to get to P6 normally.  But after the "p6" part, you add "admin.jsp".  

For example, if the URL that you usually use to connect to P6 is:

http://172.22.1.115:8203/p6

Then the administration URL is:

http://172.22.1.115:8203/p6/admin.jsp

This will bring up a screen as shown below:



This looks virtually identical to the java administration application, but it is much easier to get to!

By default the number of activities is limited to 5000.  This is mainly a safety valve.  If you are connecting over a slow internet connection it may take a long while to load over 5000 activities.  Or, if your local machine does not have much memory, your web browser may be bogged down by more than 5000 activities.  And so 5000 was chosen as a reasonable limit.  But you can easily change this if you need to see more.  The maximum value allowed currently is 100,000.

Note that after changing this setting, you must press the "Save Changes" button in the lower right corner.  Then, you must also log out and log back into P6 to have the new limit in effect.

If you need to see more than this, you may want to first ask yourself why - can you really get use from seeing so many activities? Also, you can use activity filters to only see certain activities.