Quarterly Town Hall Recap: Latest Release Highlights and Behind-the-Scenes Improvements

The product management team recently hosted the quarterly town hall highlighting new features and functionalities in the latest release of Deltek PIM, along with how the engineering team is working diligently behind the scenes to improve the user experience.

These town halls are an opportunity for Deltek PIM customers to learn about the latest information, 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.

20.0 Release Highlights

We have been talking about this release for months and it’s finally here: Deltek PIM 20.0.

Email and Document Management System

Publish emails faster, find documents more quickly and learn more through the enhanced online help

• Smart Email Publishing: Publish a single email or up to 100 emails in a matter of seconds. Save time by letting the smart email publishing tool scan your emails for content and make suggestions of where to publish emails.
• Simplified Document Management System (DMS): Introducing a new ‘smart’ user interface option, which includes an updated look and feel of the solution and simplified filter options.
• Online Help: This release includes a new Online Help feature that, once you hit the help button, the feature will display topics specifically related to the area of Deltek PIM in which you are working, automatically filtering your help topics and providing you answers faster.

Mobile App

Access more data on site, create more dynamic reports and update observations more quickly

• Live Browsing: Historically, Mobile Working users could only access the contacts and organizations directly associated to their assigned projects. This release includes Phase 1 of live browsing in the Mobile Working app, beginning with live access to PIM’s global contacts and organizations. The goal is to further enhance project team capabilities to access and manage project data anytime from anywhere
• Observations Reporting: We have expanded our use of SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) into observations reporting, where you now have greater flexibility in creating observation reports tailored to your business.
• Observations Bulk Edit: The new Observations band includes a bulk edit tool that allows you to update multiple records simultaneously, saving you time.

Deltek Collaboration

Benefit from better integration and account management enhanced

• Increased Document Control: Ability to support multiple renditions of a single file (i.e., PDF, Word doc) allowing more flexibility when sharing documents.
• User Interface: Improved the user interface in Deltek PIM to make it easier to set up the connection between it and Deltek Collaboration.
• Space Export: Added ability to export documents and associated conversations once a project is complete.

Deltek University

Your transition to Deltek Learning Zone 3.0

• Alongside the v20.0 release, we’re updating the Learning Zone tab in Deltek PIM with an interim training portal giving you access to content from within your PIM Product, with no login required. This interim solution will be in place during your transition to the Deltek Learning Zone 3.0. Please note that as this is an interim solution and due to the lack of account or login options, certain functionality such as reporting and assigning courses is not available. Access to the current Learning Zone will still be available until the end of December 2020 and can be accessed here.  

Watch the on-demand recording of the Deltek PIM Q2 Town Hall to learn more or read this recent blog which provides the highlights.

Tech Corner

Deploying better software for our customers is a priority for our engineering team.  Senior Director of Engineering Andy McDonald discussed how we are making behind-the-scenes improvements to ultimately provide your users with a better experience.

Shift Left

This "shift left" concept is a quality initiative that we launched last year within Deltek Engineering across all product teams. The principle behind this is that the earlier a bug is spotted and removed, the better – both in terms of cost and time. So we look to shift the bug removal as far left on this process chart as possible. Similar to the AEC industry where it is easier to fix a design issue on a drawing than it is to fix that same issue in the field during construction.

The ultimate goal is to minimize these bugs for our clients, as well as free up more time for us to develop new features, so customers will get more software quicker.

SSRS Reporting

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is now mandatory for Deltek PIM 20.0 for our on premise customers. SSRS is a server-based report generating software system from Microsoft. It is a more user-friendly way of creating and deliver a variety of dynamic, interactive and printed reports.

If you haven’t set this up on your internal server, you will need to plan for it as part of the upgrade to Deltek PIM 20.0. The new self-upgrade tool has a lot of support in it to help ensure that it is setup correctly.

Behind the Scenes: Changes in 20.0

We have made a fundamental database change within Deltek PIM 20.0 that affects many parts of the software. By doing so, we have vastly improved the performance of the system by eliminating unnecessary extra processing when accessing the database.

Furthermore, we can check a customer’s on premise database using the new self-upgrade tools to mitigate any risks ahead of the upgrade.

Behind the Scenes: What to Expect in 20.1

The main focus of our engineering team in 20.1 will target the administration screens and general setup within PIM. This is one of the oldest areas of the system in terms of technology, so it needs to be updated to support more browsers.

To prepare for this initiative, the latest 20.0 release included a complete overhaul of the underlying storage for our web configuration.

As we continue our progress, customers should be aware that any extra settings they have applied to the web configuration file will be pulled into the database and will continue to work within the PIM application. In addition, anyone directly accessing the web configuration in their own bespoke software may need to rework their code to use the functions Deltek has supplied. If anyone needs more information on this, customers should contact their account manager or customer success manager who will provide assistance.

Stay tuned as we near the next release for more information on our progress and the associated enhancements.