Quarterly Town Hall Recap: Digital Transformation, Self-Upgrades and More

The product management team recently hosted the quarterly town hall highlighting how digital transformation can drive change in your organization, new tools that will be included in the next release of Deltek Project Information Management (PIM) and enhanced security around your data. These town halls are an opportunity for Deltek users to get the latest information about their products, get tips and tricks from the experts and know what’s happening with Deltek. It is also an opportunity for you – the user – to get your questions answered.

This post includes a recap of some of the town hall; but if you missed it, you can watch it on demand at the link below.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation continues to be a hot topic. But what is driving transformation? It’s more than simply turning data into 1s and 0s; it is taking that data and doing something powerful with it. As technology evolves at a higher rate than today’s businesses, creating an opportunity gap which is where companies can benefit from a “digital transformation advantage.” By doing so, businesses are able to be more competitive in the way they win more work and how they deliver those projects.

Client Self Upgrades

With the next release of Deltek PIM in late Q3, customers who host their system on premise will have the opportunity to perform their own upgrades. Through the new Deployment Admin Console (DAC), Deltek PIM customers will be guided through a series of steps that will evaluate the current environment, perform checks and assessments to determine if there are any issues, provide options to mitigate those issues and, finally, upgrade the product to the latest version.

What are some of the advantages to performing your own upgrades?

• Flexibility to access new features and enhancements as soon as they are released
• Ownership of the upgrade process with your own internal teams
• Ownership of the upgrade timeline, as you won’t be reliant on Deltek’s availability
• Minimize the cost of upgrades by decreasing or eliminating the need for consultancy services

Stay tuned for more information as we near the release of Deltek PIM 20.0.

Deltek Collaboration

Last summer, we launched Deltek Collaboration in relation to Deltek PIM. Since then, we have been working with customers to gain their perspective and feedback of how we can improve the solution. We are excited to add the following capabilities as a result of that direct feedback:

• Ability for administrators to export and archive projects and spaces
• Enhanced ability to handle revisions, ensuring all users have the latest document
• Support for uploading multi-file types simultaneously (i.e., Word, PDF, DWG)
• New property statuses that will be retained as data is linked to and from Deltek PIM
• Enhanced user interface to make the initial folder mapping process easier
• Improved handling of file transfers, giving you more visibility and control

Tech Corner

Security of your project and corporate information is a major area of focus for clients and software is constantly being updated. Andy McDonald discussed what is changing and how technology departments can prepare, especially as these changes affect the Deltek PIM product.

Staying Current

It is important that customers keep current with all software providers, including operating systems and anti-virus software. We have seen some unique incompatibilities with Deltek PIM as customers have upgraded their Windows environment but not their anti-virus software. So it is crucial that customers stay current across their entire system. This will be the first question any of our partners (i.e., Microsoft) will ask should we ever need to escalate an issue with them.

TLS 1.2

Effective v19.0 released in 2019, Deltek PIM supports only TLS 1.2 enabled (or ‘hardened’) server environments. Deltek continues encourage our customers to use secure HTTP for all connections. If a customer needs assistance with preparing their servers, they can reach out to their Deltek Account Manager.