Dimensions CM is Software Change and Configuration Management for Agile development, developed by Serena Software and now sold by OpenText.
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SourceForge
Score 9.9 out of 10
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SourceForge is a B2B software discovery platform, featuring 4000+ categories in its comparison engine that potential buyers can use to compare software by user reviews, features, pricing, integrations, operating system, and deployment.
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
I recommend SourceForge to anyone or business that needs both commercial and open source software. This platform has a wide variety of software with many categories that allow easy search for any project, in addition to the fact that searches can be done separately (commercial and open source software) so as not to have mixed results which go with different purpose. In addition to the fact that the community of this platform is quite active and that there are always times to discover new projects that can be useful for a company or individual person.
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.
The overall design that SourceForge has really leaves a lot to be desired, although the entire platform works perfectly, I think that the design should be much more attractive.
There is currently no feature to save your progress on a review you are writing, so if you are writing a review and the browser is closed for some reason, all progress of the written review will be lost.
Souceforge was very straightforward and easy to manage. The leads worked for us so there is not a lot else to say about why I'd use it again. This isn't some complicated software product, it is a simple inbound marketing channel that is meant to generate leads and help us with brand awareness and it did exactly that.
SourceForge is super easy to use and very intuitive. And their support team and campaign managers help whenever we need it. Using SourceForge as a user is easy, and administrating a business software listing is easy as well. They also have great documentation.
We've never had any issues or downtime with SourceForge. Since we've been a user, the platform has never been down. Or at least never that I've noticed.
SourceForge loads extremely quickly whether you're using the front end or administrating your product listing on the back end. All pages are snappy to load--no issues with page speed whatsoever.
I hardly ever use the support on SourceForge, as I have not needed it. Their product works well for me. One time I had to email them and they got back to me the same day, but that's my only experience.
When we first signed up, they pair you with a campaign manager who trained us on how to use the product properly. The product is simple so the training was only about 30 minutes and after that we understood all the features and how to make the most of it. Most of the work came with making a custom landing page and building a follow up process for our sales team.
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
G2 has a larger commitment time upfront and for a more expensive rate, which wasn't the best option for our team as we were just exploring the resources that existed out there at the time. We preferred Sourceforge as well due to its subscription service, making it easier to commit from the start.
SourceForge has been plenty scalable for us. Our marketing department is able to edit listings and our executives can also log in to the platform if need be for leads and reporting information. SourceForge offers multiple user access and role permissions, so it's pretty scalable and easy to use for our entire team.
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.
