Official Daptiv Blog

Daptiv PPM Winter '09 is LIVE!

2008-11-10T23:13:00Z

Daptiv is pleased to announce the release of Daptiv PPM Summer '09

Daptiv PPM Winter '09 extends use of the leading On-demand PPM solution to multiple languages, browsers and platforms, giving users more choices than ever to use the system in the ways they want.

Daptiv PPM localized in French, German & Spanish

With the launch of Winter ‘09, users can now use PPM in French, German & Spanish as well as in English. Using the individual language/culture setting, team members experience the software in their language, while collaborating with other members of the enterprise. Note: Daptiv’s corporate website, daptiv.com is now localized too, for the convenience of its international customers and prospects.

Now Supporting FireFox and Mac

Besides the new languages, Daptiv PPM Winter ‘09 also provides new browser and platform alternatives for users. Daptiv PPM now supports FireFox 3.0 (Internet Explorer & Macintosh), opening up another browser choice for individuals and enterprises.

More for Managers: Next-Generation Gantt Chart

Daptiv PPM’s next generation Gantt Chart (BETA) is packed with enhancements to make it easier to manage tasks and projects. It’s faster, has more filters, and lets users add more tasks. It also zooms to fit the portion of the schedule users want to see, lets users create multiple dependency types by clicking-and-dragging, and more. The new Gantt chart saves users time by letting them create their project schedules directly in a browser without using external project tools.

Another time-saver for managers: enhancements to Team Manager lets Project Managers and (and Resource Managers) request (and approve) individual resources rather than just resource types.

More for Administrators

- Changes to Billing Rates history will improve accuracy of historical calculations and reporting.

- Updates to the ProjectTransit client improve the usability of this utility for integrating with Microsoft Project.

- Daptiv Outlook Integration now auto-updates when a new client is available – no more manual upgrades needed.

More for Team Members

Daptiv PPM Winter ‘09 gives users control to receive notifications when and how they want them, including:

- Setting up consolidated “digest” notifications that can be grouped by project or application, and sent to the user weekly or daily during a specified time period

- Suspending notifications (e.g. for vacations, out-of-office, etc.)

- Changing notification format between HTML and text

- Setting notification preferences by Daptiv PPM application (e.g. one set of preferences for Tasks but another for Issues)

- Updating all notification settings from a single location.

Daptiv PPM Winter ‘09 introduces a new Help system to give team members better, easier access to help topics and an improved search engine for getting their answers faster.

If a lot of these features sound familiar, it might be because several popular Greenhouse features are represented here -- around 2,000 "points" worth. Thanks for your input in the Greenhouse, and enjoy Winter '09!

Good Luck Tom & Addie!

2008-08-19T21:08:00Z

We're very proud of the team over at Chase Paymentech including Tom Bannon and Addie Monson. Chase is doing some very smart things with Daptiv in their organization, and they're now nominated for an award!

Chase is a finalist in the Computerworld Best Practices in Business Intelligence competition in the Innovation and Promise in Business Intelligence category.

Winner will be announced at Computerworld's Business Intelligence Perspectives Conference, being held at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa, in Phoenix, AZ September 8-10.Congratulations, and good luck. Please let us know if you win.

Speed--the Value of Fast Value

2008-07-30T21:04:00Z

We recently shared some metrics we've been tracking for the past 3 quarters on how much time it takes our new customers to go from 'subcribe to live'. Phil Wainewright, the well-known pundit on all things SaaS at ZDNET covered the news his blog this week. Here's some additional background on why our tracking of this set of metrics is important to us. The post also features our new customer, InterContinental Hotels Group, who discuss their use of Daptiv PPM to manage new hotel openings. Thanks, IHG!

What is Daptiv Subscribe to Live?

Subscribe to Live is Daptiv’s methodology for helping customers rapidly create value and realize a return on their investment through rapid and streamlined configuration, training and implementation.

Why is it called Subscribe-to-Live?

Subscribe to Live (or Daptiv ‘S2L’) is exactly that. It’s a measure of the number of business day’s between when the customer signs their subscription agreement with us, and the day that their solution is configured and being used by their user community to manage their day to day business.

Can you provide more background on the numbers in the press release?

We looked at customers that began their subscription and went live during the past three quarters of our operations—Q4 2007, and the first 2 quarters of 2008 ending June 30. During this period we implemented more than 200 organizations, the largest user community to go live during this time period was 1003 users, and the smallest was 11 users. The actual average subscribe to live metric is 29.81 days.

Why is Subscribe-to-Live important?

Business software is evolving rapidly. The advent of web 2.0 technologies and the software as a service business model have enabled vendors like Daptiv to throw out the old way of buying and delivering software. In the process, we are driving faster time to value and real benefits to customers which is what S2L is all about. It’s important to note as well that we’re not offering a consumer web tool or a simple product for social network or collaboration although those are elements of our offering. We are helping organizations manage diverse and complex business processes, and they are taking advantage of the flexibility and configurability of our platform to achieve this speed.

Isn’t Rapid Return on Investment Common to All Cloud Computing?

Not necessarily. Business applications delivered in the SaaS model still require you to think about and implement features and tools that support and map to your business process. Not all cloud computing vendors provide the same level of flexibility and configurability. A key enabler of our fast time to value is the flexibility and rapid configuration tools built into the Daptiv SaaS offerings.

How much is this costing Daptiv customer?

Our typical customer spends approximately 25% of their first year subscription contract price on professional services for configuration, coaching, training and education. So if you are paying $100,000 for an annual subscription, you would spend approximately $25,000 to get up and running in less than 30 days, your people would be trained, the software would be configured to your business process needs, and you would be prepared enhance and modify your environment going forward.

Our S2L approach is heavily focused on coaching so that we leave knowledge and power behind when our consultants leave.

Daptiv PPM Spring ’08 is LIVE

2008-04-23T23:47:00Z

Daptiv PPM Spring ’08 went live April 12, bringing together several enhancements to help you make Daptiv the single source of truth for your Mid-Office.

There are features in Spring '08 to make it easier to get data out of Daptiv PPM (Recurring Report Scheduling, Export Custom Views to Excel/PDF, Web Services) features to make it easier to get data into the system (Import Projects, Web Services), and several user experience enhancements (Remember My Settings, Capacity Planner Performance) – since good user experience leads to more adoption, more data & even more visibility for your business. We’ve also rolled out some features to give easy access to information about your Daptiv PPM service (What’s New, Inline System Status Notices). This release is a natural follow-up to our Fall ’07 release, in which we joined its rich native PPM data capture, custom views and custom data with browser-based reporting and dashboarding tools to create Work Intelligence™ -- giving companies complete visibility into the managed work in their enterprise.

Thanks for your support and enjoy Daptiv PPM Spring ’08.

Links:

Spring ’08 Web Page

About Daptiv PPM Spring ’08 (Documentation)

Spring ’08 Data Sheet

Daptiv YouCon 08

2008-01-26T01:38:00Z

Well, I'm back in Seattle (oddly the sunniest place this week between San Diego, San Francisco and here...). But we had a phenomenal experience with our customers and the other attendees at YouCon '08.

First a couple of informal "awards"

Best use of props in a presentation Award -- Tom Bannon and his team from Chase Paymentech (who would've known that hardhats could do all that?)

Longest Trip Award -- Charl Morkel from Blue Nova, a Daptiv implementation and consulting partner from Australia.

Biggest Secret But Not A Secret Award -- Daptiv Connect, our new Integration Service

We really wanted to accomplish 3 things with YouCon this year:

Provide an opportunity for our customers to network and share ideas
Interact ourselves with people in our customer community from around the world
Share our plans and vision, and solicit feedback on how we can do better

I think we accomplished all three. For those of you who couldn't be there here's a quick summary of the announcements we made, and a little bit about what it was like:

Daptiv's Year in Review for 2007-- Jeff Pancottine opened the event, and talked about our our business performance and key investment areas for last year. In a nutshell: in 2007 we have more customers, higher bookings, higher revenues, and we made significant investments in world class infrastructure to deliver our on-demand solutions.

Our Vision for Collaborative Business Apps and Managing Work in the Enterprise was shared by Christian Smith. He discussed many strategies and themes we've developed over the past several months that are driving our product release plans including our recognition that combining the structure of project management and the freedom and agility of good collaboration tools makes a more compelling whole than either apart. He also shared the vision we have for helping our customers manage their WORK which of course will include projects, but also many activities that might not fit that formal definition. Another key theme discussed by Christian was the importance of visibility and how our vision for work intelligence is part of that objective of better managing work for business results. Those of you who have already dived into using the Work Intelligence capabilities in our Fall Edition 07 service are probably starting to figure that out.

Daptiv Product Roadmap -- was shared by Eric Bergman from Daptiv, and highlighted things such as our plans for delivering Daptiv PPM in new languages in 2008, where we're taking our services in the future to offer more flexibility, new capabilities for creating more collaborative business applications, and also how we're changing and enhancing the experience around certain core features of our PPM service in the next year.

Introducing...The Daptiv Greenhouse! -- Nicole Shaw, a solution designer at Daptiv, introduced the Greenhouse. The Daptiv Greenhouse is part of this community site, and is our new forum and tool for gathering innovative ideas and product suggestions from our community. The Greenhouse is part of our commitment to collaborating with you on what we bring to market, and will provide you with visibility into what your peers think, and how we plan to respond in terms of new product releases. The Greenhouse will be in beta for the next two months, and we invited our YouCon attendees to join. We will share more information around this with everyone after our beta period.

Daptiv Connect -- in San Diego at YouCon we introduced our new innovation service called Daptiv Connect. Chris Broyles, our VP of professional services along with Greg Moerbe from Pervasive Software with whom we've partnered to create and deliver Daptiv Connect, explained the link between visibility into information and the various approaches to bringing that data into your environment. A challenge for always, our new Daptiv Connect service provides a simpler, more maintable way to think about integration, and promises to bring real benefits when combined with the Work Intelligence features for dashboarding, analysis and reporting that we introduced with the Fall Edition of Daptiv PPM. Daptiv Connect promises an approach to integrating both SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to on-premise systems that is maintable and flexible compared with brittle custom integration approaches. Look for more information on Daptiv Connect in the days to come. It is available today and we demonstrated our first packaged integration between Daptiv PPM and Salesforce.com.

Anthony Williams, Co-Author of the zeitgeist book of 2007, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, opened the second day of YouCon with a keynote address to our attendees. Anthony's mix of examples from durable goods companies, consumer products companies, financial companies and the technology sector along with his demographic research findings on the way the next generation of workers is wired were revelatory for our attendees and we got a hugely positive response to his talk.

I must say that a real highlight of YouCon this year was the customer showcases presented by Darlene Fladager from MIT, David Ludwig from Dell Financial Services, and Tom Bannon, Tony Gamboa and Addie Monson from Chase Paymentech. There's nothing like hearing it from people who use our service everyday to manage their business, and each of these way really interesting in ways as different as their organizations. My thanks to each of them, it is quite striking and really rewarding to see our service adapted and focused on these real world challenges in business and in academia. The other attendees were rapt in each of these presentations.

So there it is for those of you who couldn't join us. Hope to see you next time...

Daptiv Customers and Partners Expected at YouCon '08 Next Week

2008-01-18T21:39:00Z

Daptiv's user conference, YouCon '08 is happening next week in San Diego at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa. We're looking forward to seeing all of you there! Anthony Williams, Author of Wikinomics will keynote on Wednesday morning, and we'll be making some new service announcements as well as hearing about the future of Daptiv and a year in review from CEO Jeff Pancottine. I'll post some updates from YouCon next week while we're there.

Whitehouse Gets with the SaaS Program

2008-01-18T21:33:00Z

I read this yesterday, and think it represents a major tipping point for SaaS companies (including Daptiv). Karen Evans, administrator of the OMB's Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology, endorsed software as a service. Read the story

The Scoop on Our New Name...

2007-11-07T22:51:00Z

Jeff Pancottine, President & CEO, Discusses the Evolution of eProject to Daptiv

I recently spent a few minutes with Jeff to talk about the choice to change our name from eProject to Daptiv, and what it means for us as a company as well as to our customers. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation:

Tim: Why are you changing your company name from eProject to Daptiv?

Jeff: We wanted a name that was somewhat less specific than eProject—one that would allow us to continue to provide the world’s leading on-demand project portfolio management software, while also giving us more flexibility to introduce new services in the future. We also felt that the timing was right. We’ve had a phenomenal couple of years from a growth standpoint, and these things only get more difficult the bigger you become.

Tim: What does Daptiv mean?

Jeff: Well, as I mentioned we were looking for a name that was less specific, and that would be flexible as we grow our business. I think Daptiv evokes some things, but it’s not intended to “mean” anything. You’ll notice that even the typography of our new brand identity is a little bit casual, a little bit playful. We wanted an iconic brand, but also one that was approachable, and didn’t seem stodgy. I would be happy to hear from our customers, both old and new. Feel free to share with me what the name Daptiv has come to mean to you and your organization.

Tim: Does this mean that you are still innovating in the project portfolio management market?

Jeff: Yes, absolutely. We see projects and teams and portfolios as critical components to successfully manage work in the mid-office. We will continue to focus on delivering the best on-demand PPM software.

Tim: You mentioned the ‘mid-office’. Tell me more about that.

Jeff: Organizations have spent the past 20 years adding sophisticated technology to their business to manage transactions and reporting for back office financials and inventory, etc. and more recently, for customer interactions and transactions through CRM tools like Salesforce.com. The work that happens in an organization that’s not front office or back office, is what we call the MID OFFICE, and it’s where organizations’ competitive strengths lie. We think there’s enormous potential for organization to approach the teamwork and strategic initiatives, and yes, ‘projects’ in their business with a similar set of enterprise tools that also provide visibility via reporting, dashboards, quick and easy custom views and the like. So whether this is an IT portfolio, or a new product development and go to market process, or whether it’s planning for an acquisition, we think software can do more for organizations in the mid-office.

Tim: Is the company’s ownership changing?

Jeff: No, we continue to be a privately held company based in Seattle, and our new brand is a way for us to articulate a richer value-based story that includes project and portfolio management, but also goes beyond it to embody the idea of managing not just projects, but work.

Tim: What is Daptiv doing beyond PPM?

Jeff: Event in our current PPM service, Daptiv PPM, you can see that our set of tools provides not just project portfolio management applications, and things like resource management, which are core elements of the PPM software market; it also touches on the interconnected requirements of really managing work—things like integral collaboration services, the ability to create ‘DIY’ or do-it-yourself applications that actually map to business processes and needs that you have—which are perhaps adjacent to the core project portfolio management elements, but also relate to managing work in the enterprise.

Tim: What do you think makes Daptiv different from other PPM software vendors, and more broadly from other tools people use to manage their day to day work?

Jeff: We have a mantra at Daptiv—it’s 4 words--YOU-WORK-EASY-ON-DEMAND. These really embody how we are driving our business, and how we are offering value to our customers in helping them address the real business management challenges they face.

You—is important because we see business software changing and evolving. 10 years ago, it was ok to design software with a bad UI because with back office applications, there were relatively few users interacting regularly with the system. Today--and especially since we focus on managing work—we have thousands of individuals interacting with our software every hour. This means that we need to think about how it feels to you. Whether you are a C-level executive just logging in for a dashboard snapshot, or whether you are a team member on a new product development project, we believe that the software should allow you to make the choice about how you view it, how you interact with your data, and be flexible enough to accommodate that.

Work—represents the evolution of our focus on projects. We’ve come to understand that while organizations definitely want better tools to manage “projects”, they also really need better tools to manage work that might not be structured as a project. Our mission is not to make everyone into a project manager, it’s to help our customers better manage their work so that they can compete effectively. The mid-office has been largely relegated to the use of personal productivity tools—and these are great for the work you do alone. But the huge opportunity for organizations is to link personal and organizational productivity, and this can only happen with an integrated environment where tools for your own heads-down work come together with the bigger objectives your organization is trying to meet. This is where our new capabilities for Work Intelligence really shine. Not only does Daptiv give your teams tools to manage day to day work, but it now provides you with an easy way to report on share and visualize data to help understand what’s actually happening with the strategic work in your organization.

Easy—this is closely related to our focus on you. It has become more important to make software easy and here’s why—it’s nice for the end user, and it helps them do their job better. BUT, it has a bigger impact. If our tools are easy to use, it means that our customers will have users actively contributing data to the environment. This participation and contribution is what drives visibility into the work that’s happening in an organization, and ultimately allows managers to make much smarter decisions because they have better data. It’s a two-fold payoff.

On-demand—this is perhaps the biggest change in the business software arena in the past decade. The growing ubiquity of internet access means that organizations are no longer need to depend solely on their own IT departments. They can now rent services for a duration that makes sense to their business, and the vendor (us!) handles uptime, hardware, maintenance, networking, access, etc. All of these services are part of our delivery model, and you as a customer do not have to worry about it. With on-premise software, you have to procure hardware, install software, update software, update servers, re-start servers and monitor the operating environment. This takes employees, often several people, and of course you have to pay their salaries and benefits. You also have to pay for power to run these systems and cool these systems. Increasingly, savvy organizations are realizing that on-demand business software makes sense. With software as a service (SaaS) you focus on your business process and their unique competitive differentiators, and leave the mundane aspects of service delivery to us. You always have the latest and greatest features, and all you need to do is pay a monthly subscription and have a browser to access the service.

Tim: Thanks, Jeff. Let’s do this again real soon!

Top 10 Ways to Use eProject DeskDocs

2007-07-24T23:21:00Z

eProject’s DeskDocs, new in PPM6 Summer ’07 Edition, gives you a Windows Explorer view of all the documents in all the projects you have permissions for, making online document management simpler than ever. Here are just a few of the ways you can now use DeskDocs:

1. Install DeskDocs from anywhere:

a. from a Project (Project Menu > Documents)

b. from the Documents Tab

c. from the Utilities Download Page (get there by clicking on your UserName and selecting “Download Utilities”)

2. Uploading multiple docs? Definitely use DeskDocs for this purpose. Move them all with one click and drag; save the extra clicks. Avoid Carpal Tunnel.

3. Have Document folders in PPM6 that you’re always adding to, or updating? Save yourself time and make a Shortcut on your desktop straight to that folder (right-click in DeskDocs on the folder you need, and save the Shortcut to your desktop.)

4. Use DeskDocs to get a team to really use a central documents repository. If you make it easy, people will do it.

a. Have a DeskDocs shortcut(s) created on the desktops of each person in a project team

b. Tell them to drag all the project docs into this folder

c. Every team member can do that

d. New project? New shortcuts

e. When teams share and collaborate, project ROI improves.

5. Save directly from Word, Excel, Acrobat, etc. without even going back to your desktop. For example in Microsoft Word, you can go to File > Save As > DeskDocs and navigate to the exact eProject folder where you want to save your Word doc. Now, how cool is that?

6. Share anything. Remember, you’re not limited to Office documents (e.g. Word, Excel, PPT). Some businesses need to share diagrams, pictures, movie files, any types of files. Share ‘em all, we say – the cool stuff and the boring stuff. Take advantage of the now-expanded storage in PPM6.

7. Move entire document folder structures. For example, know you’re working on a project that will require deep folder hierarchies? Create them on your desktop, and transfer them over as a set.

8. Configure as needed. You can configure Deskdocs manually for other operating systems like Vista (see PPM6 Help). Or, to trigger notification emails for each document created in DeskDocs, you can change the project or enterprise settings.

9. Deep-Six that document management system you’re currently paying money for, and make eProject PPM6 your official system of record for collaborative documents.

10. Find your own creative uses for DeskDocs – we created this flexible tool for you. Let us know what you do with DeskDocs.

Hot Time, Summer in the City

2007-06-29T23:07:00Z

Well, we’re moving into Summer, and it’s been an eventful few weeks here at eProject.

First up, we are almost ready to go live with PPM6 Summer Edition ’07! July 7 is the go-live date. This is a really exciting release for us, and we hope for you too. Summer Edition ‘07 includes lots of customer requested enhancements to things like timesheets and authentication and login that will make your life easier if you’re a user or an administrator. The real exciting pieces of Summer Edition though are the brand new ways that you’ll be able to use PPM6 in tandem with your productivity software like Microsoft Office. Summer Edition features the end of beta for our Oulook Integration. You can now update tasks from within outlook and have changes automatically update within your PPM6 environment. You can also create appointments in Outlook that sync with your PPM6 calendar and vice versa.

We’re also delighted to introduce eProject Deskdocs—a brand new capability that allows you to drag and drop documents from your desktop to projects in your PPM6 enterprise, all the while maintaining access and authentication controls as their set up in PPM6.

For those of you who don’t Google eProject every single day, I wanted to also share a couple pieces of news:

eProject is positioned in visionaries quadrant in the brand new for 2007 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Project Portfolio Management Applications. We are the only on-demand vendor in the visionaries or leaders quadrants. The new Magic Quadrant was introduced last week by Gartner anlysts Matt Light and Daniel Stang at their annual PPM Summit in Boston. We were there waving the on-demand flag, and ended up being known as “the flip flop guys” (this is because we were wearing Summer Edition flip flops and T-shirts, not because we're prone to changing our positoin on controversial topics...). IT PMO Director Madeleine Kerr from C&S Wholesale Grocers delivered a case study about C&S’s selection and implementation of eProject even though they had licenses to another packaged PPM solution as part of a deal with their mainframe tools vendor. Attendees were very impressed with Madeleine and her story about C&S. Thanks, Madeleine!
Closer to home, we were delighted to be a finalist in this year’s Best Companies to work for in Washington by Washington CEO Magazine. We are #3 in the medium business class this year (up from #12 in the small business category last year). We really do have great people at this company, and it shows up in awards like this.

Check Out Sramana Mitra's Blog Posts on eProject

2007-03-19T20:36:00Z

Sramana Mitra is a Silicon Valley blogger who follows trends and writes frequently on the extended enterprise and the emergence of "Web 3.0". She recently spoke with Jeff Pancottine about eProject and our future.

Spring is Coming March 24!

2007-03-15T22:53:00Z

We’ve been working on the Spring Edition ’07 release of PPM6 for a while now, and recently completed our beta testing program. Spring Edition ’07 will go live on March 24.

The Spring Edition of PPM6 includes a significant number of fixes and enhancements based on customer feedback and requests (more than 400 in total!). It also includes a number of new features—specifically features that make reporting and the Advanced Reporting Engine more useful for program and portfolio level data, as well as some new capabilities to add team members while in the application, not the administration module.

For an overview of Spring Edition, see www.eproject.com. The release notes contain detailed descriptions of bug fixes and enhancements.

No Shelfware

2007-03-03T17:03:00Z

On a recent visit to the eastern US, I came across a fine example of “shelfware”. Shelfware is a classic outcome of traditional installed software not being used. In the case of this prospect, they had the entire media for Clarity sitting on their shelf. Literally. They had bought and paid for it. The customer shared with me that they had recently come on board to implement the project management office (PMO) and recognized they had no tool to support the project lifecycle from request, prioritization, selection, and execution. She learned that the company had purchase Clarity recently and analyzed how best to deploy that tool for the PMO. After analysis, the customer determined that Clarity would cost at least $1,000,000 additional spend to implement and maintain for 2 years. Why? Server infrastructure costs, server administration costs, software administration costs, internal deployment staff costs, the many consultant required to customize and implement the software, and the massive training costs. We call this the hidden “iceberg effect” of traditional installed enterprise software for project portfolio management. Usually the under the surface hidden costs are 4-8 times the license costs. Those can really sink your ship!

Moreover, she realized that their multi billion dollar organization was a verily low project maturity and, while Clarity is a fine product, it is designed for highly mature project organizations (level 4 and above on a 5 level scale) and only for projects of 300 hours or mote. More than 75% to their projects are shorter than 300 hours. It was a complete mismatch.

We provided this customer with a alternative solution at 1/5 the cost fully deployed that matched the their maturity and allowed them to grow in maturity in the coming years. Shelfware is a real problem in the software industry. With software as a service, this is no longer a concern. For our business to work customer have to use the software and renew their service. SaaS providers like eProject are aligned to the customer needs. And if you every do stop using it, just turn don’t renew our service. You save time, money, and don’t have unnecessary server and network infrastructure deal with.

It's an Honor Just to be Nominated...

2007-02-05T21:53:00Z

Hey, we got a very cool nod from the industry this week. eProject's PPM6 has been selected as a finalist for a 2007 CODiE award. These are conferred by the software and information industry association SIIA. More in our press release.

Configuration in Action

2007-01-09T16:35:00Z

I was visiting one of our long time financial services customers in December and they shared with me some interesting insights into their business goals and how eProject is helping them. One of our key beliefs is that by providing structure to unstructured data and by creating centralization, visibility, and real time status we can improve organizational efficiency. In PPM6, for example, we introduced Custom Views. The concept is to allow non-technical users to create limitless views of their data and to save these for re-use at any time. These views are easy to create using a step by step wizard. Fields are chosen, filters applied, grouping, and calculations can be performed. Now data that used to be only viewable via hard copy reports can be viewed in real time using the eProject interface. The real time nature means instant access to status with drill down to more detail. We applied Custom Views to most areas of PPM6. In 2007, you will see enhancement so the Custom View framework that will increase its power and visualization options.

Our customer will use custom views to take over what is today a manual report generation process. Rather than compile pages and pages of data and output to hard copy for a status meeting, they will now use PPM6 as a component of their meetings and pull up information they need using a series of custom views. In the past, their operation meetings always were based on repot data that was days (and in some cases weeks) old. Now they can view real time status as they make business decisions about their projects and work activities.

This customer also uses another key eProject capability – Dynamic Applications. They created a change tracking Dynamic Application and have managed over 4200 change request in the past 2 years through eProject. They have full insight, tracking, automation, and reporting against changes and configured around the way they need to track change data.

It is always exciting to see our solutions in action. Every day our customers are solving more and more business problems through our highly configurable platform. As we enter 2007, we are looking forward to bringing customers more enhancements and even greater value.