Properties are accumulated for the project and these can come from a number of sources as follows:

  • System Project Properties - these are a centrally system managed set of properties which can be collected for all projects consistently and from 4.1 onwards are designed to replace In-Built and most of extended properties.  They can be defined here. and either updated in the Project Summay Info form or in the new Project project Properties form in a grid for the entire current portfolio.
  • Project Control properties - these will be loaded automatically from Planner files used by the project and listed in the Project Controls set up in project Summary Info. This data will not be populated if the project uses MS Project plans or excel registers.
  • Spreadsheet properties - these can be set up to bring additional property fields from spreadsheets held in the project and loaded to the list.  If your project uses a standard PIAB version 4.3 method template it will include data here from your finances spreadsheet and Benefits spreadsheet.

These properties will be displayed in your Summary Information form and in reports and can also be presented in The project picker and Dashboard if required.  If you are building your Portfolios from rules, then the rules will be operating on these properties.

These properties will also be written to property history automatically.  From version 5.2 every time a property changes the new version is written and timestamped to history.  Over time this builds the data that is used in trend analysis.


Optimised Data handling for properties

The properties system as explained here is very flexible, to make this work quickly and efficiently when dealing with large quantities of properties and large numbers of projects some optimisation strategies have been implemented.

Whenever a spreadsheet which feeds properties is checked in the system rereads all properties for that project except System project properties and caches that data on the server.  This slightly slows the checkin of the specific file but makes working with the properties data itself much quicker.

The master list of properties used by each user is kept appropriate for that user, if they never use views with certain properties in then they don't appear on their list.  A 'refresh my properties list' option exists on various forms so that users can get the full list when they need it.

When working with Portfolio Rules the data is just returned and updated and rules applied for the currently selected properties and projects, an option to update globally is provided as an alternative route.