Ronald:

Simplified my choices?

Finally they did it. I knew they stopped any upgrades and technical support for these two products but somehow hoped they would reconsider.

Maybe it is time for 90% of the market to accept Primavera is no longer viable for us. Probably we must start considering other solutions, preferably scalable solutions from stand alone "Project Groups" (for 90% of us) to "Enterprise" (so 90% of us can communicate with the remaining at 100% compatibility).

P3 is what got Primavera to the top, lack of it I hope will get them down by the drain soon.

None of my clients do need nor wants an "Enterprise" solution. They are no Dept. of Transportation, no Electric Power Utility, no Water Utility but hometown contractors.

Ronald what options my clients do have? I wonder what Municipal and State Agencies will specify as they cannot ask for what is no longer available. P6 would be an overkill for a Fire Station, an overkill for small municipal jobs, an overkill for a Parking Building, an overkill for Water/Wastewater Treatment Plants, an overkill for a new High School even an overkill for New Vocational Schools, an overkill for 99% of our jobs while Primavera contractor is a joke.

Ido:

WHAT WOULD BE THE BEST TOOL I SHOULD USE AND BE FAMILIAR WITH?

For the moment I feel like in "limbo" even though my clients didn’t care much, they simply said will go back to Microsoft.

We use Primavera SureTrak because of our volume of work, SureTrak at $ 400.00 street price will do it at 1/10 the cost of P3 which is $ 4,000.00 and only through a Primavera Vendor. I wish we all could afford P3, it still has the edge, unfortunately primavera does not care about those who need this application and not the enterprise stuff.

Regarding P6 this is substantially more expensive, it requires a network administrator who will maintain and backup the database, because every other month there is an update to solve a few bugs you got to add a yearly maintenance agreement per license to get what should be free. Every P6 upgrade at the network level must be done by an IT guy who knows about databases and network administration. I have seen occasions when after an upgrade by an IT person all links to external documents were lost, even a change in directory could create chaos. Don’t get me wrong, the enterprise stuff is precisely what a few must have. Deployment of P6.2 if a true web application (should be faster on the Internet than using Metaframe) might even be harder and more expensive as you will get into issues such as band width. Don’t even consider Primavera Contractor, a companion to P6, it is a joke. It is incredible how Primavera released such a limited product, which cannot even do resource leveling while being too limited as to the amount of activities it can handle.

MS Project might be a bug in itself but eventually you will have in some way to deal with it, get a copy of it and learn the basics. Don’t use it as your software of choice.

All these are based on essentially the same theory, all can be tamed, but even those without bugs do have their limitations, their tricks and traps. It is your choice.

try to open SQL server express studio
use user name "sa"
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