CA PPM 14.4 | The Armstrong Release

1. What’s Removed from CA PPM 14.4?

First, the moment we all expected has been confirmed: Business Objects is gone. Au revoir Crystal Reports, you complicated, beautiful things. Hello again, Jaspersoft. We’ve been enjoying you since 14.2 (especially since your dashboards stepped it up in 14.3.)

While there’s a handful of End of Life (EOL) announcements for add-ins and connectors, the other notable removal in CA PPM 14.4 is WebSphere, so you’ll want to migrate to Tomcat before upgrading. (See the product support page).

Let’s get to the fun stuff: what’s been added and enhanced.

2. What’s New in CA PPM 14.4?

Our favorite new addition to CA PPM 14.4 is for Advanced Reporting in Jaspersoft Studio. Along with the JasperReports Server Cumulative Patch, which corrects several issues, CA added a JDBC driver, which lets you develop reports faster in SaaS, since you’ll be able to access Jaspersoft studio without needing VPN access to the database servers.

CA PPM 14.4 Enhancements You Need to Know

While there are many enhancements in the Armstrong release, including to CA Agile Central Support (formerly Rally, see https://wiki.ca.com), there are several others we need to outline.

3. Portfolio Management Enhanced with ACAs

In CA PPM 14.4, it’s now possible to add aggregated calculated attributes (ACAs) to investment objects. Hooray. This will allow you to role up child investments, like projects, and view their summaries by portfolio.

4. Administration Enhanced with New Password Policy

The Armstrong Release operates with a new, out-of-the-box (OOTB) password policy. Industry standards are the new rule, unless you want to keep your existing passwords when you upgrade. That means you’re looking at eight characters with uppercase, lowercase, numeric, and special characters included. You know the drill.

5. Administration Enhanced with Load Data Warehouse Job Changes

Planning to run a Load Data Warehouse Job? CA PPM 14.4 now incorporates financial plans: the Plan of Record, the current budget plan, and all benefit plans.

6. Timesheet Auto-Populate Options

Here’s one you’ll probably enjoy. The Armstrong release has smoother timesheet options. Imagine opening up your timesheet and seeing all your tasks auto-populated. Now imagine seeing last week’s time entries auto-entered against those tasks. You can stick to just the tasks or have the time added.

It makes the whole process faster, and in this release the options are easier to find. Just check the box you want: populate assigned tasks and/or copy time entries from previous timesheet.