Eclipse PPM gets cool new features for Fall 2011 release!

The Fall 2011 release of Eclipse PPM On Demand is all about spreading the word about your projects!  New functionality for adding project Notes and sharing them on the project Bulletin Board will help to keep communication high on your projects.  Email notification alerts will ensure those outside of Eclipse are kept apprised of changes.  Enhancements to Generic Resource Types will greatly aid in the management and lifecycle of resource assignment.  The following highlights discuss these new features and many more. 

Communication Enhancements

Project Notes:

Notes represent the ability for project participants and stakeholders to log comments, decisions, lessons learned, informal progress and status remarks and other unstructured, but valuable content against a project. Notes can be entered using shortcuts from anywhere on a project and from My Eclipse and the Portfolio Summary Dashboard. Notes can be viewed on a project in the NEW Project Bulletin Board. They can also be searched across projects using the Eclipse PPM Quick Search.

Bulletin Board:

The Bulletin Board is a new project tab in Eclipse PPM. This view shows various Status, Notes and other activities on the project and makes a great landing page to quickly get a sense of the current state of the project and recent activities. From the Bulletin Board authorized users can enter Formal Status Updates, modify Health Indicators (“stoplights”), enter Project Notes and change the Project Status itself.

Email Notifications:

Email notifications will initially come in the form of automated alerts.

• Automated alerts are triggered as soon as a condition to which a user has subscribed occurs. The initial set of alerts are:
  • When I am added to a project
  • When I am assigned to a task
  • When a predecessor task to my task is completed
  • When I am assigned to an Issue
  • When I am assigned to a Risk
  • When a Status Update is made to one of My Projects

Resource Management DashBoard: Generic Resource Type Demand

An additional section in the resource management dashboard will be added to enable reviewing generic resource type demand. This view option will be synchronized along the same timelines as the current named resource view and thus will facilitate reviewing demand (generic resource types) and the available supply (named resources) together and interactively.

Portfolio Summary Dashboard Enhancements

• New charting options for Health Indicators, Organization Owner and Project Owner.
• Charts now include the ability to turn legends on and off. This is a nice option for the dashboard views but even more helpful if you want to export chart images for use in other applications or documents.
• New grouping options for Health Indicators.

Project Calendar - Managing Working Days on Project Schedules

This extension to an existing feature allows a user to manage both working day and non-working day exceptions to a project schedule calendar.

Data Integration - Data Consumer API's

The integration feature provides secure web service-based API’s enabling organizations to “pull” data from Eclipse PPM for use in applications, data warehouses or custom reporting solutions. This release will include Project, Issue and Risk data and is the first release in the integration roadmap.

Additional Enhancements Include:

• Advanced Search - The Advanced Search engine is being extended to provide support for the use of generic Resource Types. Resource and Projects can now be searched for using Resource Types and accelerators using these searches are being built into the Resource Management Dashboard and Team Builder panel on project schedules.
• Quick search and substitute a named resource for generic resource types on a project. This feature enables a user to quickly see the named resources that can fill certain demand identified on a project and look at that resource’s existing allocation across other projects and operations before assigning them to the project.
• Project searches used in reviewing resource load charts have been added to “preferences” (in other words they are remembered when you come back to the load chart subsequently).

We are excited to bring our customers these new enhancements and are already looking forward to our upcoming Winter and Spring releases.  Remember, your feedback counts!

Please note that features and associated details are subject to change at Solution Q's sole discretion.