So we’ve been busy again 🙂 The sixth planned update of our flaghip product is out exactly 2 months after the last major upgrade. That release also came with a rebranding from “Project Financial Server” to “Project Essentials”  to better match the set of features offered.

The CU6 update is mainly focused on performance enhancements. We heard customers and we re-engineered parts that weren’t performing as expected in their environments. Here’s the list of fixes and improvements included:

• Data Import
  • The user locale is correctly considered in conjunction with the field separators
  • Addressed issue where the workflow stage selection was not always enforced
  • Addressed issues with importing projects that had a different EPT than the one selected
  • Better handling of negative values
  • Addressed pagination issues with large number of mapping
• General performance improvements
  • Reporting job: processing only projects that are dirty; no additional PSI calls for projects with calendar exceptions; global setting added for turning the synchronization on/off for performance troubleshooting
  • Queue memory consumption fixes: a maximum threshold (default: 500MB) can be specified in the application configuration file. The Queue manager will span off new processes when the threshold is reached, limiting memory usage growth
  • Saving financial values: mapped Custom Field could cause apparent performance issues due to suboptimal design. The end-user experience has been improved, with control being restored as soon as the request is processed, while resource-intensive operations are handled asynchronously through the Queu
• Licensing and Administration
  • The CAL compliance warning from Financial Settings and Manage License page will be displayed only on Production environments
  • Export License Information file now includes the product version and SK
• Workflow Editor
  • Addressed issues with errors being displayed when republishing or saving a workflow that has at least one stage with On Approval transition type and the EPT associated to workflow does not have a CTT
  • Better handling scenarios where the PWA instance is provisioned in languages not supported by UMT Project Essentials
  • Removed “Rejection Type” options for forward compatibility with the next major release
  • Replaced the resource selection item swapper from the Edit Stage Settings popup with a resource swapper to improve performance when dealing with large number or users

Version history:

• UMT Project Essentials
  • RTM (SP2/CU5): 1.0.4729.1000
  • CU6: 1.0.5002.100
• UMT Project Financial Server 2010
  • RTM: 1.0.3023.1001
  • SP1: 1.0.3602.1000
  • CU1: 1.0.3825.1000
  • CU2: 1.0.4106.1000
  • CU3: 1.0.4322.1000
  • CU4: 1.0.4514.1003

Customers and Partners can download CU6 via the online portals on www.umtprojectessentials.com. We will be post an update of our SDK as well as code samples soon.