CollabNet Releases SourceForge Enterprise Edition 4.4

July 31, 2007; 06:02 AM
CollabNet, the primary sponsor of the Subversion™ project and leading provider of collaborative software development solutions, today announced the immediate availability of SourceForge Enterprise Edition 4.4. New features in this release include significant enhancements to Tracker, new project categorization capabilities and improved integration to a wide range of software configuration management (SCM) tools, including support for Subversion multi-site. This release further extends the platform’s open architecture, enabling distributed development organizations to leverage web services to integrate the SourceForge framework into their existing development environment.

SourceForge Enterprise Edition 4.4 is the first update to the development platform since CollabNet acquired SourceForge’s software business on April 24, 2007. The combined business now supports more than 350 enterprise customers with over 1.2 million developers who use CollabNet development tools every day, in dozens of countries around the globe.

“Software is ubiquitous in today’s world; increasingly software is becoming one of the most critical differentiating items that determine the commercial success of a product, from hi-tech systems to cell phones and consumer electronics, from banking to automotive and medical devices," said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. “To meet the demand for high quality software, organizations increasingly rely on collaborative development techniques where software engineers, technology partners and customers collaborate as one team on one or several projects from anywhere in the world. CollabNet is the recognized pioneer and leader in globally distributed development. The SourceForge development platform, its open architecture and new capabilities in version 4.4 raise the bar for organizations who want to leverage their existing IT investments by utilizing SOAP web services to optimize development tools and processes and to accelerate development efficiency on a global-scale, with minimal disruption.”

SourceForge Enterprise Edition’s integrated suite of development tools provide for greater control over critical project tasks and assets by seamlessly integrating disparate development IP and tools onto a common development platform, while automatically keeping team members apprised of critical deadlines and task assignments. SourceForge enables associations between team communications and related documents, digital assets, issues, and activities. This unified approach to development projects helps distributed teams reduce miscommunication, improve accuracy, and speed critical project decisions.

“A unique attribute of SourceForge, and a key differentiator from our customers’ perspective, is the robustness and openness of the SourceForge architecture,” said Richard Murray, CollabNet’s vice president of engineering. “A growing number of development organizations are choosing SourceForge as their core software development platform because of its adaptability and broad integration capabilities. Unlike conventional development tools, SourceForge is built to tie together and optimize heterogeneous development systems across globally distributed teams without the need to replace existing tools or development methodologies.”

Enhancements in SourceForge 4.4 are designed to help distributed teams further improve collaboration and communication to deliver higher-quality software while accelerating development productivity of distributed teams. New capabilities include:

    * Tracker enhancements:

      -- Improved project management and team coordination and more
         flexible support for Requirements Management -- from agile to
         waterfall methodologies. Developers can break down artifacts
         into unlimited parent-child relationships, create
         cross-project tracker dependencies, easily identify and
         manage blocking issues and change the field order in the
         artifact listing.

      -- Tracker administrators can now use new flex fields to add
         multiple user selections to Tracker artifacts and select
         dates from a pop-up calendar view to simplify the management
         of issues, defects, requests and more.

      -- Users now have the ability to more quickly identify and
         manage data of interest in personalized views using saved
         filters, saved searches and customizable columns. Also
         SourceForge Enterprise Edition utilizes an AJAX-based
         solution to provide simple field ordering for further
         user-specific customization.

    * Project categorization: Improved browsing capabilities to search through a project’s taxonomy and quickly find associated projects and downloads, resulting in increased visibility into development projects, its associated resources and assets. It also improves the reusability of development assets and cross-team collaboration.
    * Software configuration management: SourceForge Enterprise Edition also offers extended support and integration of a wide range of SCM tools, including IBM® Rational ClearCase® to consolidate disparate SCM data. Additionally, several newly added security enhancements between SourceForge Enterprise Edition and SCM servers help improve performance and security via SSL-based encrypted server communication and CVS LDAP authentication.
    * Support for Subversion multi-site: With Subversion multi-site replication support, globally distributed development teams can synchronize projects in real time regardless of location and network speed. This allows developers in other locations to collaborate on the same source code as if they were local, achieving local commit and access times while maintaining full security and source code coherency.
    * Customization: Site administrators can modify the look and feel of the application and implement feature customizations using Velocity templates.

“Our R&D investment exemplifies our commitment to the SourceForge Enterprise Edition platform and to promoting the benefits of collaboration and distributed software development to our customers and independent developer communities,” said Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet. “With the successful acquisition and integration of SourceForge’s software business completed, we’re now focused on accelerating growth and providing the highest level of support our customers have come to expect from CollabNet.”

For more information about SourceForge Enterprise Edition 4.4, you can download a product overview white paper at http://www.collab.net/news/library/ or view a recorded demo of SourceForge Enterprise Edition 4.4 “What’s new in SFEE 4.4” at http://www.collab.net/sfee_demo.

CollabNet acquired SourceForge’s software business earlier this year, bringing the two leading collaborative software development solutions for distributed teams under the same roof. The combined entity supports more than 350 enterprise customers with over 1.2 million users in dozens of countries worldwide. SourceForge Enterprise Edition, along with CollabNet’s entire product portfolio - CollabNet Enterprise Edition, CollabNet CUBiTTM, and CollabNet Subversion - continues to be supported and enhanced over time. SourceForge customers around the world now benefit from CollabNet’s extensive, global support infrastructure, including around the clock support, as well as accelerated innovation due to an increased research and development staff.

About CollabNet

With 1.2 million users, CollabNet is the most widely used platform for distributed software development and collaborative lifecycle management. Now combined with SourceForge Enterprise Edition, the company is transforming the way in which software is being developed by enabling companies to leverage global development talents and resources to deliver better products, innovate faster and reduce development infrastructure costs by 50%.

CollabNet is the primary sponsor of Subversion, a core component in CollabNet’s portfolio of software development products: CollabNet Subversion and CollabNet Enterprise Subversion enable enterprises to safely deploy Subversion by providing governance, advanced security and effective user and project administration around Subversion. CollabNet Enterprise Edition and SourceForge Enterprise Edition deliver an integrated platform for collaborative application lifecycle management that enables project members to work as one team throughout the project lifecycle regardless of their location. CollabNet’s CUBiT provides distributed development organizations with a ground-breaking virtualization solution to centrally and dynamically provision build and test environments.

openCollabNet® (www.open.collab.net) is an online extension to CollabNet; this Web 2.0 community dedicated to developers using Subversion and CollabNet offers discussion forums, in-depth technical information, product extensions, and free downloads of CollabNet’s and partners’ products.

More than 350 industry leading companies use CollabNet’s solutions today, including Reuters, Philips Medical Systems, Capgemini, and Barclays Global Investors among others. Visit CollabNet at http://www.collab.net or get more information about Subversion at http://www.collab.net/subversion.

© 2007 CollabNet.

CollabNet, openCollabNet, SourceForge and CUBiT are trademarks of CollabNet, Inc. or its licensors. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.