The Cloud is a remarkable and innovative tool. It connects people from around the world, allows us to share fun vacation pictures and adorable videos of our pets, and offers a massive network that can process any and all data under the sun.

But as anyone who's ever had to use the back end of a Cloud program can tell you, it can quickly get complicated, leading to far too many headaches and sleepless nights trying to figure out what's going wrong. We could tell many horror stories about hours spent hunched over our computers just begging our systems to work the way we want - and I bet you could too!

So when one of our clients approached us looking to evaluate their options with Cloud software, we knew how they felt. At the time, they had been using on-premise servers, but were looking to upgrade to a database with more features at a reasonable price. They had considered Software as a Service (SaaS), but found the price of such an upgrade to be too steep to be a realistic option.

Luckily, we had previously agonized over the same decision and were able to offer our personal server in the Cloud; EAI hosted by OVH, as an alternative with a much lower price than the SaaS system Oracle offered.

Our client was also in sore need of maintenance services. Before they came to us, they had been operating, maintaining, and repairing their own cloud servers with only a handful of IT specialists who were unfamiliar with Primavera to begin with. As you can imagine it was slow, frustrating work, and when things broke down it could be days before they got everything up and running again. So when we suggested the EAI server, they were quick to take advantage of our services.

Now that they've moved to EAI, our client is able to enjoy the benefits of Cloud without the hassle that comes with sustaining their database. Emerald Associates handles the maintenance, repair, and operation of EAI, and offers on-sight visits and training for our client's entire team so that they will have the familiarity with Primavera that is so crucial in today's business environment. We have been working together with this particular client for the past 3 to 4 years now to keep their servers in the Cloud running smoothly and efficiently, giving them the freedom to spend their time and energy on what really matters - their business.

Emerald Associates is well known in the US and Canada for our homegrown add-on tools for Primavera P6. We have assisted numerous companies in many diverse areas to get the most out of their P6 software. You may wonder how our tools can assist in the Department of Transportation (DOT) field to get more done in P6 with less time while still providing useful data to your stakeholders and remaining good stewards of the public's funds. Our tools will help you do more work in less time, so that your project management group has more time to analyze and perfect their schedules.

We are working with a client who have been on the Primavera SaaS cloud for awhile and are now getting serious about migrating their dispersed team to the Oracle Primavera SaaS cloud for their P6 users. We are helping them with this process using our P6-Loader for P6 v16.2 in the cloud. We wanted to go with P6-EPPM version 16.2.3, since it has some crucial patches applied to it in the last 3 months and seems to be stable.

Then we get the news we were dreading, no you can't get that version you must upgrade to version P6 17.1? So we went to Oracle e-delivery to download P6 17.1 and guess what? It is not even released for on-premise use. So what is going on?

We had heard rumors that the upgrade model in the Primavera SaaS Cloud was going to change, but did not want to believe them. Now we cannot ignore them anymore.

Below is a quick guide on how to install Ravello.

From the Ravello login click VM Import Tool. Once you see the window below, click the download GUI VM Import Tool.

We have a client in the US who was reporting performance issues with a 3rd party client application that creates large numbers of activities in the P6 database using the Primavera P6 API. I was called to help isolate the issue.

When I joined the meeting, they already had Oracle Enterprise Manager up and running, and it was easy to isolate the query that was taking a long time to run (and using almost all the CPU in the server).

While Oracle is busy working on removing Java applets from Primavera P6-EPPM, the same cannot be said for Primavera Contract Management (PCM). With the announcement that PCM v14.2 is the last planned major release for PCM, the Java applets will potentially remain an ongoing issue.

Some creative solutions have been worked up over the years with CITRIX and controlled versions of IE, but all were problematic when other tools needed other versions of Java.

A step-by-step tutorial

Since the earliest days of cloud computing technology, the question “why move to the Cloud?” has been asked over and over again. The truth is, every new technology faces doubt and suspicion at first, especially when it pretends to replace well established norms and infrastructures. But now, in 2016, more and more companies have already migrated over.

When working with the Oracle Primavera suite of products, scenarios vary a lot from one corporation to another, and each case must be studied carefully before decisions can be made.

A few weeks ago we got a panicked call from a client needing their P6-EPPM setup internally. We were surprised to find out that they had put their Primavera P6 in the cloud. They said it was for a large project they were doing in Arizona and they had some other tools in the cloud as well.

We were even more surprised when they needed the environment turned around in 48 hours. We asked, why such a rush? Then the third surprise came...they told us they lost their entire P6-EPPM database!

The Emerald team just completed a client migration to the Oracle Primavera SaaS Cloud. The client had over 1000 small (50-60 activities) projects in their on-premise Primavera P6 PPM v8.3.2. They needed to be able to share the projects for the next 2 years amongst a large collaborative program team with multiple contractors and engineering firms. This program is very high profile and reporting is paramount.