VA Software: SourceForge Collaboration

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Collaboration

SourceForge^® provides numerous tools and capabilities for establishing and promoting a more collaborative and efficient development environment. These easy-to-use, network-enabled collaboration tools have proven to facilitate collaboration on a global scale. And just as SourceForge.net provides a centralized collaborative environment for the worldwide Open Source community, SourceForge Enterprise Edition can play a central role in facilitating collaboration and innovation across distributed development organizations.

SourceForge collaboration features leverage familiar tools like email and discussion forums. SourceForge integrates these with a centralized, web-accessible and searchable repository, providing common views into projects, resources, discussion topics, issues, documents and code. This enables users to find what they need and connect and collaborate with the right expertise at the right time. To this environment, SourceForge adds an integrated document manager for improved access, management and collaboration on project-related documents. Furthermore, SourceForge facilitates knowledge "threading" by allowing users to create associations between issues, documents, forums and more, providing context to critical project decisions and discussions.

SourceForge collaboration tools and features include:

• Collaborative Development Environment
• Document Manager
• Discussion Forums, Mailing Lists and News

Collaborative Development Environment

Unlike independent collaboration tools, SourceForge Enterprise Edition integrates the tools of collaboration with the tools for managing development activities, enabling associations between team communications and related documents, digital assets, issues, and activities. With this unified approach, teams reduce miscommunication, improve accuracy, and speed project decisions. And only SourceForge enables users to access this collaborative environment from the interface with which they are most comfortable, whether from the native Web interface, from a Windows desktop, from an IDE, or from a Microsoft Office application.

Key Features & Benefits

• Centralizes all project activity into a common, searchable, web-accessible repository, improving information access, knowledge sharing and collaboration
• SourceForge Explorer, a new .NET client application, allows SourceForge-held data to be accessed from a Windows environment, enabling enterprises to speed adoption and offer greater ease-of-use, to core or extended team members
• Extensive "knowledge threading" capabilities let users create associations between project communications, artifacts, documents, code and more, reducing the time it takes to understand issues and changes
• Pervasive search capabilities improve productivity by reducing the amount of time spent looking for information

Document Manager

SourceForge provides integration document management for centralized access, management and collaboration on project-related documents. The SourceForge Document Manager enables users to collaborate on and manage documents of all types, including (but not limited to) requirements docs, design specifications, test plans, process and policy docs, and more. Automated document review and versioning capabilities allow teams to collaborate on documents and issues more efficiently and effectively.

Key Features & Benefits

• Simplifies and expedites document review processes by automating document routing for review, comment and/or approval
• Document versioning provides historical archive and comments, providing context and helping to ensure team members are always using the correct version of each document
• Document access controlled by fine-grained role-based access controls
• Pervasive search capability can search within documents of over 180 types, making it easier to find the right document quickly
• Eases compliance with document retention policies as required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Discussion Forums, Mailing Lists, and Project News

SourceForge provides threaded, integrated, searchable discussion forums and mailing lists. These simple tools are a cornerstone for collaboration in the Open Source community and increasingly for enterprise development because they are easy-to-use and work well across multiple locations and time-zones.

SourceForge also provides a news area for each project. This news area keeps team members informed of important project developments, changes, etc., improving team communication and coordination.

Key Features & Benefits

• Facilitates structured collaboration on virtually any topic to accelerate development and innovation, and supports controlled Public as well as Private forums and lists
• Communications can be associated with SourceForge tracker artifacts, documents, tasks and more for improved knowledge threading
• Automatically captures and indexes all forums, project-related communications and news into a searchable archive, creating a valuable knowledge base for accelerating both current and future development
• Forums support remote submission via email and can issue forum posts via email