PCM history

Before we jump into the details, let's look at the history of this application and its humble beginnings. Oracle Primavera Contract Management (PCM) has been around for many years. Primavera has been known as the company of choice around the world for its scheduling tool, but in the beginning very little was known about the product called Expedition. Expedition was acquired by Primavera back in the 1980s as an MS-DOS product. The original product was written around the contract relationship and the Cost Worksheet, although at that time the Cost Worksheet could be overwritten at any time. It was written with a Btrieve® database backend and required a dongle as the security device to make sure you were allowed to use the software. It included most of the modules that are currently available.

Form design at that time was very archaic and required the purchase of a Postscript® printer to properly create the forms.

The last version in MS-DOS was v4. As the world was changing and accepting the concept of Windows, Primavera created their first Windows version of Expedition, v5.0. The Windows version allowed multiple registers to be open at the same time. This was good and bad as many users didn't realize this or simply forgot that they had 15-20 windows open at the same time. For those of us who can remember back that far, hardware was trying to keep up with the requirements of Windows and RAM, and hard drive space was expensive compared to today.

Users loved the multiple open windows concept but each open window used precious hardware resources and often the system was quite sluggish as users forgot that they actually had many windows open at the same time, bringing their machines to a crawl. When Expedition was introduced for Windows, they also moved to a Sybase database and a new Windows-based report writer called Infomaker. Infomaker was a breath of fresh air at the time as it allowed the creation of forms and reports much more easily with its Windows-based interface and the ability to place various object types on the "page" easily, including boxes, lines, data elements, logos, and so on. Sybase was a nice little database engine that could handle large amounts of data with a relatively small footprint.

The Windows version of PCM was the version that introduced the Control Center as we know it today. The last version of the Windows product was 8.59. They dabbled in the browser-based application with Version 8.5 by allowing both browser-based and Windows-based clients to be used against the same database on certain modules.

This was a bit of a clumsy time for Expedition as it wasn't exactly clear which client interface to use. When Expedition came out as the first 100 percent browser-based application in this space, it met with very mixed reviews. The first version was a bit clunky and did not include the Payment Certificates module. After a few service packs and releases, it was finally accepted as the latest version of Expedition; or was it? With this version they changed the name to Contract Manager. This would be the first of many name changes to come. Being browser-based meant that there is no application that is loaded on the client machines and there must be a connection to the application server either through the corporate network or through the Internet. The Internet was certainly available; however, bandwidth was nothing like it is today and the concept of fiber was not available. Offices depended on T1 or T3 lines and it was a luxury to have DSL at the remote locations or in your home. As time went on, so were there new features and version of the application. Oracle finalized the purchase of Primavera in January 2010 including all of its applications. With this purchase also came another name change to Oracle Primavera Contract Management. When the acquisition happened there was a lot of speculation as to what would happen to PCM. Oracle then announced the release of two new versions of PCM, one still using Infomaker as its report writing application and the other using Oracle's BI Publisher as the report writing tool. BI Publisher is a much more robust and complete report writing tool but the PCM community initially rebelled against the move since Oracle did not provide a tool or method to convert all the reports from Infomaker to BI Publisher.