Turns out we are starting a new project at the company, and i’ve been tasked to review several collaboration software options, so I thought, what the hell…let’s share the wealth…
There’s many options regarding collaboration software, that range from very expensive to very cheap, from very focused to very bloated. I’ve gone through the painful process of testing many of these out, so I’ll be sharing my notes here so anyone in a several situation can benefit from them. We knew from the start that we’d have to go with a commercial option, as we required decent support for the app, but nonetheless i tried a few open source ones to see what the scene was like.
The best option, at least for us, seems to be GForge Group’s GForge AS, a closed-source from-scratch software made by some of the people that created the original SourceForge, so let’s start with that. According to the website of GForge Group (if you didn’t guess it, its the company that makes GForge AS), these are the advertised features:
Powerful Tracker/Code Integration
GForge has a powerful tracker <-> Subversion/CVS integration which lets you do basic things like linking code changes to tasks or defects, and more advanced operations like defining rules on when commits can be made, or defining re-assignments or changes when commits are made.
Advanced Workflow
New advanced workflow features include the ability to change or reassign tracker items when source code commits are made, and have these changes cascade to other workflow rules that can, in turn change other fields or reassign the item again. > Video: Demo
Eclipse Plugin v2.0
The latest version of the eclipse plugin includes document management and adds associations, time tracking, and dependencies to the tracker interface. > Video: Demo
Permission Management
GForge provides an easy interface for the project administrator to set up roles and who is assigned those roles in the project. Each role can have unique permissions in individual trackers, forums, source code trees, etc. > Video: Demo
Customers
GForge is the most widely used collaborative development environment worldwide with hundreds of known public and even more private installations. Our customers include IBM, Cisco Systems, Raytheon, Siemens, Dell and many others worldwide.
Public Sites
Joomla Code has over 85,000 users on GForge Group’s GForge AS developing extensions for the popular CMS.
Analog Devices uses GForge Group’s GForge AS to help develop software for their Blackfin processor.
From what i’ve experienced, GForge Group’s system is tightly integrated and has a right mix of features. Its PHP5 based, you can get it in a VM format so there’s little in the way of setup, and the docs written by GForge Group are good enough to get a hang of the system quickly. Tracker items can be associated with SVN commits, to forum posts, to wiki pages, to releases, to documents, and every of this items to each other. It has a good auditing system, a complete SOAP interface that should allow for elaborate scripts integration with some of the tools we are planning, and based on that interface there’s a bunch of plugins provided by GForge Group for development apps, most notably Eclipse and Microsoft’s Visual Studio.
Performance-wise (something which is a big issue in some of the other options) GForge Group’s system reportedly hosts 85.000 Joomla developers, and in our tests (with a much smaller user base), its has always been snappy enough. Regarding costs, GForge Group offered us a hard to beat deal that had no user limits of any kind, which is an enormous plus compared to other pricing schemes that you get offered where you have to sacrifice your first born to use the system for a month, and then…find a new first born.
Next week, i’ll be posting a comment on another option, just in case you are looking for an open source alternative.
Update: Just found more stuff related to GForge Group’s product…
http://programmingheaven.vox.com
http://sdreviews.wikidot.com/gforge
http://gamedevelopmentblog2.blogspot.com/2008/06/making-of.html
http://projectmanagementhowto.blogsome.com/2008/06/27/gforge-as/
