CollabNet today announced CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise 5.0, an update to its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system featuring new user interface elements designed to provide more information on a project's status.

The new UI elements are the primary features of emphasis in SourceForge 5.0, which CollabNet acquired from VA Software in April 2007. The new project page and project templates are designed for much greater customization than prior versions.

The upgraded project page capabilities in SourceForge Enterprise 5.0 allow teams to model and report on the different phases of the ALM process with nested pages and portlet-like components, something not possible in the previous version.

This allows for making custom project pages without any programming, to show things like status from the project, an issue tracker, a wiki or source code management tools. Information can be displayed on a dashboard or published in a custom report.

Tony Tarone, director of service operations for CEDAR Document Technologies, a document processing firm, loves the new functionality. "Version four is ok, you can do some neat stuff if you're creative, but the version five home page is significantly more powerful for organizing information for the various audiences to get in and see what your project is doing," he said.

"It's much better for organizing information from the home page view than we had before, while retaining a lot of the functionality I use day in and day out to run a good portion of my company," Tarone added.

Enhanced project templating

The other major new feature, enhanced project templating, lets developers capture and reuse both the structure and the content of existing projects from project pages, wikis, discussion forums and other workflow processes. That way when a new project is begun, a developer can simply reuse their old template and quickly set up a new project page without having to reinvent the wheel.

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Other new features in SourceForge 5.0 Enterprise include improved security administration, the ability to more easily define groups at a global site level, and role-based security across all tools, according to Rob Cheng, director of product marketing for CollabNet.

The company is also cutting the price to make it more affordable. "With all this capability around enterprise ALM, we were really excited about breadth and depth of capabilities but felt price point was difficult for people at the entry level," said Cheng.

The previous price was $86 per user per month, starting at user one. The new price is $4,995 per year for the first 25 users. A 25-user license under the old model would have worked out to an annual cost of $25,800. From user 26 on up, the $86 per user/per month fee applies.

CollabNet today also announced the release of CollabNet Desktops for Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse. CollabNet Desktops feature automatic configuration and unified access to Subversion repositories, documents, issues, and other SourceForge Enterprise artifacts for both .NET and Java development projects.

While it's rare to mix the two environments, customers do tend to use both and want to manage both .NET and Java from a single platform, said Victoria Griggs, senior director of product marketing for Subversion at CollabNet. "We find customers have development environments where even on a single team, they have people working on both dot Net and Java," she told InternetNews.com.