See above. Recommended questions: What type of feedback or tracking will we be doing? Will this need to be client-facing? How will we track content edits? How many users will be assigned to issues in a given project?
Gemini is well suited to help track issues and change requests, projects, bugs, time logs, etc. It is less appropriate for reporting needs or general office management needs.
Serena CM is well suited to highly controlled, audited, and process driven environments. It will allow strict segregation of duties, and change traceability. If implemented correctly it will help you quickly build trusts with your auditors. It is also well suited to environments that require constant branching and merging. Due to the complexity of the product and learning curve for your development and operations team it may be overkill in a small shop with loose rules
Code Promotion: Dimensions CM allows supervisors to control changes to code, in that they delegate requests to developers, and act as a gatekeeper prior to promoting to the next environment. This functionality is configurable so you can set up a workflow that best fits the structure and requirements of your own company.
Code Repository for changes and versioning: Code can be checked out by item or by synchronizing folders. Code revisions can be compared against other revisions or work files. Item histories show which developers made which modifications, and which supervisor and operations personnel were involved in assigning the request and promoting the code to each environment. Additionally a pedigree will show a stream diagram which graphically displays branches and merges.
Deployment: Serena Change Management offers help automating deployment including integrations with SVN and Jenkins. Its newer versions also have a powerful graphical deployment automation tool (Serena Deployment Automation- SDA). It comes with a certain amount of licenses built-in. If you have a many nodes to deploy to there will be separate licensing costs for that.
The only major negative that I have encountered with Serena CM product is that the very power and flexibility of the tool means there is a risk that you will make a mess of things. In other words it gives you plenty of rope to tangle yourself with. I recommend careful, well thought out deployments implementing the built in roles and workflows that can be turned on and configured, using a consistent methodology.
My experience with the Serena help desk support has not been impressive. Though reasonably polite and diligent, the technicians were well trained, and often gave bad advise and terrible scripts. On several occasions I had to rewrite scripts they have me; if I had run them as provided they would have caused even more difficulties than the problem I was trying to solve. I speak of the support in the past tense because I conditioned myself not to call them, it was usually just easier to solve nay problems my self. They do have a good account management team though, and for any major issues you can go thru them.
I would plan on renewing and staying with BugTracker.net simply because it is a no nonsense easy to use tool. Once you get it set up and understand the small nuances with this custom piece of software, it really is a great tool to help your organization get started with Defect Management and BugTracking without having to drop several thousands of dollars on tools that are more fluff than function.
Gemini's development team continues to improve the product and provides a comprehensive roadmap of upcoming features that makes you want to upgrade as soon as a new version comes out.
Like learning to play checkers, the interface is easy, but the strategy has more of a learning curve. Figuring out the best prompts to use to get the desired outcome with less tries is taking me awhile to develop that skill. The images that I am able to generate are close to "camera-ready", but most do require some tweaking in image editing software to fix AI artifacts like distorted faces and randomly spelled words.
I've never had any problems with the support for the Gemini application itself, but it seems every time I re-install (on a single machine), I run into a licensing issue. As a result, I need to go to the app's website and request that my activation key gets reset or resent. In either case, it's a pain, but as I have to reinstall infrequently, it's a small price to pay for an otherwise solid application.
In my case, it's not that Gemini won; I simply use Gemini regularly as a backup plan to compare results obtained with the leading AI in my corporate environment. I believe it's important to have this comparison of results, especially when dealing with critical issues. I think the most powerful AIs for the general public today are ChatGPT and Gemini, in that order, although CoPilot is very well positioned due to its integration with widely used Microsoft products in the corporate world.
Serena CM is superior to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) in overall functionality, but does not have very good native integration with Microsoft. Therefore in a Microsoft centric shop with no audit needs ,TFS would be better. Otherwise I would choose Serena CM
Serena has facilitated our annual completion of various audit and technology control certifications. These certifications make a huge difference to our company's reputation and bottom line.
