CollabNet Release Targets Distributed Development

CollabNet today announced the release of CollabNet Enterprise Edition 5.0 (CEE), a significant update to its application lifecycle management (ALM) software that helps codify and enforce best practices in a distributed development scenario.

As the company’s name indicates, CollabNet is focused on development teams that are spread out over a distributed area. This would seem the exception rather than the rule, as most development teams would logically be under one roof, but not in 2007.

“The business and technology trends are driving toward distributed teams,” Bill Portelli, CEO of CollabNet, told InternetNews.com. “For the first seven years of CollabNet, distributed teams were not mainstream. In the last 12 months it has become so. For many companies it’s now an imperative to collaborate because they are becoming more distributed.”

The hallmark of version 5.0 is it works with Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) such as Eclipse to help all of the members adhere to best practices and development policies of the firm or developer. People may not be under the same roof but they will develop according to the policies IT has set down.

CEE 5.0 provides a single platform for large organizations to manage remote development sites, while improving and leveraging communication and collaboration between the development team members.

“The key element of differentiation is most companies have their own processes for development, but one of the barriers to ALM is most companies come out of the box and try to force their own development process on you,” said Portelli.

Instead, CEE codifies how a development shop defines its business processes so any member of the team, regardless of location or if they are outsourced from a third-party, knows the processes involved.

CEE 5.0 includes enhanced templates that allows project teams to get more rapidly started with ALM. It also supports reporting for Subversion, the version control software CollabNet developed. Members and managers of a team track and report on user transactions such as the number of code check-out, as well as commits and imports done over a period of time at the project level or at the platform level.

For online support, CEE 5.0 has a project-level Wiki that all team members can use, read and update and integrated communication capabilities such as e-mail, mailing lists and discussion forums for the team members.

CollabNet Enterprise Edition is available either on-demand or installed on site. Pricing is $50 per user per month.