PVCS® Version Manager™7.5 - Synergex

RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS
PVCS ® Version Manager 7.5
Overview
Merant’s PVCS Version Manager organizes, manages and protects software assets, supporting cost
effective software configuration management (SCM) across your entire organization. PVCS Version
Manager is easy to install, use and administer, while offering support for parallel development and
management of large projects. Using a variety of interfaces, access to powerful Version Manager
features is easy. Version Manager has a standalone desktop interface based on Microsoft Windows®
Explorer concepts; a browser-based interface for easy deployment or remote developers (across
town or around the globe); and a development interface for using the robust features of Version
Manager from within many leading integrated development environments (IDEs).
Merant understands that development organizations have different needs, and offers a range of
products for varying SCM practices. With the Professional suite, which includes Version Manager,
we find that this is an ideal solution for the following criteria:
• Short/recurring projects (3 – 12 months)
• Project teams requiring rapid start-up (less than a month)
• Distributed project teams working form a central repository
• Project teams required to adapt to change rapidly and interested in low cost of ownership
What’s New with PVCS Version Manager 7.5
PVCS Version Manager is part of the Merant PVCS Professional suite. For this release, the version
numbers have been synchronized for simplicity. PVCS Professional 7.5 includes PVCS Version
Manager 7.5, PVCS Tracker 7.5 and PVCS Configuration Builder 7.5.
This release and planned future releases focus upon three major areas: Distributed Development,
Security and Scalability. Improvements in these areas combine to provide additional support and
flexibility for maturing software development teams, whether large or small.
Distributed Development
Working with team members in a distributed fashion has become the norm. In fact, most
organizations are experiencing these challenges on a daily basis - remote users, geographically
dispersed sites, multiple platforms, and parallel projects. To solve this problem we have added the
following capabilities:
TrackerLink capabilities are now provided directly within the Version Manager browser client. This
provides integral Tracker capability to developers within their native work environment. Through
TrackerLink and a new administrator setting, enforcement of code-to-issue association (if desired) has
never been easier. In some industries (FDA regulated), the ability to provide a complete historical
audit trail (who, what, when, how and why) for ALL code changes is mandatory as part of the 21 CFR

PVCS V E R S I O N M A N A G E R 7.5
Part 11 regulation. TrackerLink allows traceability of change control authorizations to the impacted
source code, which prevents unauthorized software changes.
Figure 1: Establish traceability between source code and issues.
Key benefits:
• Understand what issues required you to make source code changes to make decisions about what
areas to re-write, partner or simply maintain
• Spend less time training through a common user experience within desktop and browser clients
and make usable today
• Implement a common process for local and remote developers
As organizations continue to evolve, it is more important to interact with a wider spectrum of
platforms while still offering a common user experience. In other word, one size no longer fits all, as
demonstrated by the varying programming methodologies, development tools and operating systems
that often coexist in the enterprise, or even within a single development team. That said, the need to
provide a common issue-tracking component provides a greater chance to expedite development
projects. By leveraging Citrix technology, along with Microsoft secure tunneling, Professional
(Version Manager and Tracker) native clients can run on additional platforms, and thus extend desktop
functionality to additional team members, including remote developers.
Key benefits:
• Leverage existing knowledge for rapid development
• Spend less time training through a common user experience within desktop and browser clients
and make usable today
Security
The corporate network is becoming increasingly more complex. In fact, it is not uncommon for users
to interact with ten to fifteen different applications on a daily basis. That said, managing who can
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access what system has become a nightmare. Version Manager helps eliminate the pain by now
supporting LDAP compliant authentication systems (such as Novell, Active Directory and iPlanet) to
streamline user authentication management. Centralization of this key network administration
function will greatly simplify the user interactions to network based applications.
Key benefits:
• Reduce total cost of ownership with centralized user authentication management across the entire
network
• Common user authentication management across the entire network
Scalability
Merant continues to focus on performance improvements with each new release. With this release
Merant has improved performance over WAN network environments. WAN environments have two
major factors that come into play; bandwidth availability and data size. Since bandwidth availability is
usually already set, Merant has leveraged Java compression technology for the Version Manager
browser client to improve throughput over the network pipe. In fact, Merant Answerline can help you
optimize projects that must be shared across a WAN. This is accomplished, by identification of least
and most compression “friendly” files and moving them to projects not shared over a WAN.
Key benefits:
• Optimize performance using existing network
• Optimize project performance being shared over a WAN
New Platforms
Merant continues to focus on providing leading edge solutions to the market and has added support for
the following upgraded platforms:
• Red Hat Linux 7.3
• SuSE Linux 8.0
• Sun Solaris 9
• Sun JVM 1.4
• Apache 2.0
New Integrations
Merant continues to focus on integrations with best in breed solutions across the entire software
development lifecycle and has added support for the following upgraded products:
• Telelogic DOORS 6.0
• Microsoft Visual Studio.Net
• IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer 5.0
• Eclipse 2.0
• Ilogix Rhapsody 3.0
• TogetherSoft Control Center 6.0
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Recap of PVCS Version Manager 6.8 Release Highlights
PVCS Version Manager 6.8 provides ease-of-use improvements, additional integrations and platform
support, and new WebDAV-based collaboration capability. These enhancements combine to provide
additional support and flexibility for maturing software development teams, whether large or small.
Distributed Development
PVCS Version Manager began its support for WebDAV with version 6.8. WebDAV promotes
collaboration among distributed team members by allowing files (source code, documents,
spreadsheets, project plans, etc.) to be easily accessed from remote locations over the Internet.
WebDAV also enables contributing team members, such as documentation experts or product
management/marketing, to use the tools they are familiar with (i.e. Microsoft Office - Microsoft
Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Windows Explorer), while still accessing and collaborating with the rest
of the development team – all within a Version Manager project. As a project lead or team member
updates project documentation, changes are automatically tracked inside of a PVCS Version Manager
project simply by using ‘File Save…’. WebDAV extends Version Manager’s ease of use and team
collaboration to every desktop.
Figure 2: Project documentation can be managed within a PVCS Version Manager project, using
direct access from WebDAV-enabled clients, such as Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Key benefits:
• Manage and link project documentation in the same repository as your source code
• Extend version control to project documentation beyond development
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Scalability
Improvements have been made for concurrent usage of Version Manager browser client in instances
for large and/or distributed project teams. Specifically, it is now possible to turn on daemons, which
supports multi-processed archive access. Also, large organizations or large archives can expect to see
minimal resource contention issues moving forward.
Key benefits:
• Daemons supports multi-processed archive access
• Daemons removes most resource contention issues
Flexibility
More than 15 new PCLI commands have been exposed in this release of Version Manager. All the
new PCLI commands are documented for easy programmatic access to Version Manager. Example
PCLI commands include, but are not limited to:
• Get
• Unlock
• Delete User
• Label
Summary
PVCS Version Manager is a feature-rich, scalable and flexible change management technology for
software configuration management, with superb ease of use and the ability to grow your SCM
practices as your projects grow.
When setting up a new project structure, you will find a familiar hierarchical structure and easily be
able to match your approach to developing and managing software change, and you can expand
projects and branch and merge at will.
The Version Manager Development Interface works the way developers work. Version Manager
functionality is integrated with leading IDEs and desktop functionality can be additional extended via
Citrix technology. PVCS Pulse keeps project team member communicating project modifications,
thereby reducing code re-work and strengthening team collaboration.
Unlike entry-level team version control tools such as Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Version Manager
is not easily outgrown. It is enterprise scalable, flexible and maintains data integrity no matter how
large the project.
And because Version Manager is part of the PVCS family of software configuration management
solutions, you have a compatible migration path to other capabilities as your needs grow, including the
ability to manage change requests, workflows, builds, baselines, releases, and the process of change
itself.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION
800-547-7827
Info@Merant.com
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Merant’s software and services give companies the most flexible control of code,
content and workflow, enabling them to better view, track, protect and reuse these
business-critical assets. More than 90 of the Fortune 100 rely on Merant’s costeffective
solutions to automate business processes, significantly boosting
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Also available at authorized resellers.
Copyright (c) 2002 MERANT. All Rights Reserved.
Printed in the U.S.A. PVCS is a registered
trademark and Version Manager, Tracker and
TrackerLink are trademarks of MERANT. Other
trademarks are the property of their respective
owners. 11/02
RH02VM274
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