VA Software has added wiki support to its SourceForge Enterprise Edition development environment for distributed developer teams.
With SourceForge Enterprise Edition 4.3, the company is offering standardised wikis and other improvements, such as a tracker workflow engine for tracking bugs and change requests. Available either for deployment behind a customer’s firewall or in a hosted environment, SourceForge Enterprise is intended to bring the benefits of distributed, open source-style development to enterprises. The package is modeled after the SourceForge.net open source development site.
“As that [site] grew up over the years, there was an increasing demand for enterprise organisations, for companies, to be able to perform their development in the same way as open source developers” who collaborate across the globe, says VA’s CTO, Colin Bodell.
SourceForge supports whatever tools a customer wants to use while providing a central point of installation, data retention, and activity management.
The wiki engine in Version 4.3 unifies wiki deployments to make it easier to manage them. “We’ve seen organisations, some of them that may have 200 to 300 of these things that are running all over the place,” Bodell says. “Even if each one of these things takes an hour a week to manage and maintain, that number adds up very quickly.”
The tracker workflow engine in Version 4.3 allows a user to define steps for reporting bugs or change requests. The product also enables email to be sent for purposes of tracking the status of bugs; email will be sent to whoever has jurisdiction over the bug.
Also included in the new release is the ability to customise both the user interface and the manner in which projects are presented.
Users can add features such as project descriptions or links to external materials.
Another new feature in release 4.3 is the capability to create links on the SourceForge tool bar that trigger external applications bound to SourceForge, via a single sign-on.
Users can also view who is monitoring SourceForge-held materials and can add users to the monitor list.
Version 4.3 costs US$2,725 per user.