Application menus

The Application menus are always present. Administer lets you manage your own application settings. If you have the right privileges, then you may also use this menu to access application-level settings and data.

Print will print the current screen. In Appendix B, Reporting, we will discuss screen printing and reporting in more detail.

The Help menu offers three options:

Logout logs you out of the system and returns you to the main login screen.

Tabs

The tabs across the upper left side of the page are always present, and represent five areas of work:

Modules

As shown in the earlier screenshots, each tab contains a set of modules in a strip directly beneath the tab. For Dashboards, this consists of one or more dashboards that you may choose. For Portfolios, this consists of the different actions you can take to manage and use your portfolios. For Projects, this consists of the many project-related activities you may wish to perform. For Resources, this list contains links for managing, planning, assigning, and analyzing resources. For Reports, there is no set of modules.

Main screen

The items displayed in the main area of the screen vary greatly, depending on which tab and module you have chosen. However, each item does consist of one or more Java applets, which must be downloaded and run. The first time you log into P6 from a new machine, you may experience a message stating that "this application is being run for the first time…". It may take a few seconds for the applet to download. But after the applet is downloaded, you should not get this message again for that specific applet.

Now that we have given an overview of the P6 EPPM Web Client, and have shown where each item is covered in the rest of the book, we will give a detailed walkthrough of P6 Professional.