Who needs to author in Primavera P6?
Authoring means creating the baseline, building the logic, updating progress each period, running scenarios and issuing the programme. In most projects that is a small group: the planner or scheduler, sometimes a planning manager who reviews their work. Those people work in the scheduling software every day, so a P6 licence (or license, depending on your spelling and the vendor's wording) is a normal tool cost for them.
If a person never edits the logic, never changes durations or relationships and never updates progress, they are not authoring. That distinction drives the whole decision.
Who only needs to read the schedule?
Many project roles consume the programme without changing it:
- Project managers checking the critical path, upcoming milestones and look-ahead activities.
- Quantity surveyors and commercial managers comparing planned progress with certified progress before an interim payment.
- Consultants and employer's representatives reviewing a contractor's submitted programme.
- Site engineers and foremen who need the next few weeks of activities for their area.
- Directors and clients who want a summary of status.
None of these roles needs to rebuild the logic. They need to open the file, filter, look at the Gantt, and understand what is critical. Buying an authoring seat for each of them is usually more than the task requires, though the final decision depends on your organisation's policies and contract terms.
What are the options for viewing a P6 schedule without a licence?
There are three practical routes, each with trade-offs.
1. Ask the scheduler for an export. A P6 user can print or export the programme to PDF or Excel. This is dependable and needs no extra software, but it is a snapshot: the reader cannot filter, collapse WBS levels or follow relationships. See our guide on how to export a P6 schedule to Excel or PDF.
2. Use an XER viewer. The XER file is P6's exchange format. A viewer can read that file without the scheduling application. Arkan offers a free browser-based P6 viewer for XER files; see the tool page for what it supports. For background, read what an XER file is and how to open it.
3. Bring the schedule into your project platform. If the programme needs to sit next to inspections, submittals and progress, importing it into a project management platform means site and commercial teams see it where they already work. Arkan's Schedule module accepts Primavera P6 files in .xml or .xer format (up to 50 MB per the user guide) and shows activities in grid and Gantt views, with critical path analysis and comparison of schedule versions. It is not a replacement for P6 as an authoring tool, and the module needs the Schedule Upload permission on the user's role.
Is a viewer enough for contractual programme reviews?
Often yes for reading, rarely for responding. If you are a consultant reviewing a programme submission, you can read the logic, check the critical path and comment without editing. If you need to run a delay analysis with your own fragnets, or test what-if scenarios on the contractor's logic, you will probably want a scheduling tool on your side. Check what your contract and any programme specification require. Some contracts ask for a native file in a specific format with the submission, which the contractor's scheduler would produce in any case.
Does the person who authors really need the full licence?
For regular baseline development and updates, yes: the scheduler should use the application the programme is built in. The risks of working around that (copying logic into spreadsheets, rebuilding the programme in another tool, passing unlinked PDFs) are version drift and lost relationships. If your team does not have a scheduler at all, the question is less about the licence and more about who will own the programme.
What should you ask Oracle or your reseller?
Licence terms, seat types, what counts as a user and what is allowed for external parties such as consultants or clients are set by the vendor and can change. We do not describe them here. Ask Oracle or your reseller, in writing, before you make an assumption that affects budget or contract compliance.
How do you decide for your team?
Use a simple test for each person on the project:
- Will they change logic, durations or progress in the programme? If yes, they author.
- Will they only read, filter and report? Then a viewer or an export is probably enough.
- Do they need the schedule alongside site records? Consider importing it into the platform your site team already uses.
Count the first group honestly. In most project teams it is far smaller than the group that wants to see the programme. If you want to see how a team can read imported P6 schedules next to inspections, RFIs and submittals, book a demo.