About Publication Services

Before you can generate reports or view data in some areas of P6, data must be refreshed and calculations must be made in precisely arranged tables and fields. Publication Services address these needs, gathering and calculating data as close as possible to real-time. To make this happen, you can configure P6 to publish data to specific tables used for these features. An administrator must configure settings for Publication Services before you can publish data. For reports, depending on the type of data published, P6 tables may still be used to generate reports, or a combination of P6 and reporting tables may be used to generate them.

Your organization's P6 EPPM published data has two categories: project data and global data.

Published project data includes all information about your projects, including aggregates, calculations, and auditing data. Most pages that use published data use published project data.
You can publish project data on an ad-hoc basis using the Publish Projects item on the Actions menu of the EPS or Activities pages, allow P6 to publish automatically on the basis of how much the project has changed, or you can schedule a service to publish project data automatically.
Published global data includes enterprise data for projects (for example, codes and UDFs), activities (for example, codes and UDFs), resources, and calendars as well as the enterprise data dictionary and security data. Reports use published global data as well as published project data.
Global data is published by services which are usually scheduled to run automatically.

P6 tracks all projects enabled for publishing and determines when each project will be published on the basis of the number of changes made to the project and the time since its data was last published. You can configure the settings guiding this process on the Services page of Application Settings.

Publish a changed project when the... Number of changes exceeds: P6 tracks the combined number of changes to the project itself as well as its WBS, activities, relationships, resource and role assignments, risks, project codes, activity codes, and UDFs.
Publish a changed project when the... Time since last publication exceeds: P6 also considers when the project was most recently published and whether that period exceeds the Time since last publication setting.

If both the number of changes is great enough and the published data is old enough, as stipulated by these two settings, P6 creates a job to publish the data.

Note: P6 has checks in place to ensure that publishing jobs cannot impair system performance, no matter how many jobs are created at any given time.

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