Digital.ai (formerly CollabNet) aims to help enterprises and government organizations deliver high-quality software at speed with TeamForge, its application lifecycle management suite. According to the vendor, Digital.ai offers innovative solutions, provides consulting and Agile training services, supports more than 10,000 customers with 6 million users in 100 countries, and has been recognized for 13 consecutive years as SD Times 100 “Best in Show” winner in the…
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OpenText Dimensions CM
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Dimensions CM is Software Change and Configuration Management for Agile development, developed by Serena Software and now sold by OpenText.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
CollabNet TeamForge is more well-suited for technically knowledgeable users such as developers, systems analysts, QA but not for non-technical users due to the technical data used throughout the tool. CollabNet TeamForge is appropriate for most applications development. In any industry especially suited for high demand software delivery environments.
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
I would like to see personalization for managing artifacts, that is, allowing the user to customize pages and save personalized settings and then save them as bookmarks.
I would like an improved subversion browser such as a graphical user interface rather than a basic file explorer.
I would like built in features for CollabNet TeamForge integrated with subversion so that i can associate my private code branches and code changes.
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.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
They always answer the phone when we put a call in, any time. They have consistently sent out contractors when needed and were there every step of the way when we switched over from ClearCase to TeamForge years ago. The support is what you really pay for when you buy into TeamForge.
Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs, CollabNet VersionOne, and Arxan)
CollabNet TeamForge is superior to Mercury mainly because it has a subversion change management tool integrated with the product. CollabNet TeamForge offers more complexity but with more flexibility for managing and tracking projects. I think CollabNet TeamForge is more comprehensive than either Mercury and JIRA. They're all user friendly tools with short learning curves but CollabNet TeamForge is most efficient in my experience. JIRA was recently adopted for particular applications and is currently being evaluated by various technology teams.
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.
