Welcome to the February openCollabNet Technical Newsletter. Over the last month we grew to well over 3,000 members and nearly 60,000 unique visitors. Additionally we saw the discussion forums become increasingly lively. Thanks to all the members who are making openCollabNet a success. We encourage you to participate, like a few of our members who installed the free 15-user download of CollabNet Enterprise Edition and started their own community FAQ with questions and answers extracted from the various discussion threads. Check it out at http://tinyurl.com/2teleo.
Best regards,
Guido Haarmans
Developer Relations, CollabNet
In this Issue:
- Update of Subversion book for 1.4
- Subversion Turns 3
- User groups in CollabNet Enterprise Edition
- Daylight Saving Time
- Process improvement
- Webcasts and events
- Recent CollabNet News
- Feedback and Suggestions
Update of Subversion book for 1.4
The authors of Version Control with Subversion are updating the book for Subversion 1.4. The book is an open-source project and development can be seen at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en. A lot of the new content is already there, such as documentation for svnsync, but please realize that there is a nightly build of the book and things change rapidly.
Here is an excerpt:
The svnsync program, which is new to the 1.4 release of Subversion, provides all the functionality required for maintaining a read-only mirror of a Subversion repository. The program really has one job: to transfer one repository's versioned history into another repository. And while there are few ways to do that, its primary strength is that it can operate remotely, the “source” and “sink” repositories may be on different computers from each other and from svnsync itself.
svnsync has a syntax that looks very much like every other program mentioned in the book:
$ svnsync help
general usage: svnsync SUBCOMMAND DEST_URL [ARGS & OPTIONS ...]
Type 'svnsync help <subcommand>' for help on a specific subcommand.
Type 'svnsync --version' to see the program version and RA modules.
Available subcommands:
initialize (init)
synchronize (sync)
copy-revprops
help (?, h)
$
More at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/.
Subversion Turns 3
It was three years ago February 23 that Subversion 1.0 was released. Subversion’s rise has been spectacular. Read the personal blog post of C. Michael Pilato, a long-time Subversion committer, CollabNet employee and a co-author of Version Control with Subversion. Mike reflects on three years of Subversion: http://blog.red-bean.com/pilatos
User groups in CollabNet Enterprise Edition
Last month we talked about Project groups in the CollabNet platform; this month we cover User groups.
Picture this: Some of the projects on your CollabNet site have users who are hired to work on the project for a few weeks at a time. Do you have to go in and manually turn off access permissions for each of these users whenever the contract is up? No, you don’t. If you put those users in a special user group, you can assign and remove permissions for them all at once. A user group allows the domain administrator to designate a collection of users who share a special set of privileges for designated projects on the site.
In this case, you might create a project group called "Contracts." Add to this group all the projects that use temporary personnel. Now create a user group called something like “Contractors." Add any short-term staff to this user group, and assign roles and permissions to the group as a whole. Finally, add the “Contractors” user group to your “Contracts” project group. Now you can grant and revoke access to the whole group of short-term staff whenever you want to. You can also define user groups in alignment with your organizational structure, such as by departments or development teams, then tailor the roles and permissions to suit the types of site activities you want to allow these groups of users.
For steps to create user groups and put them into project groups, see http://collabnet-products.open.collab.net/articles/usergroups.html.
There’s more on project groups is at: http://collabnet-products.open.collab.net/articles/projectgroups.html.
Daylight Saving Time
Several countries changed the start- and end-dates of Daylight Saving Time (DST) recently. The start date of DST in the spring was moved forward by several weeks and in the fall the end date was moved back. This change has raised considerable concern in the IT community about issues that might emerge when systems are running out of sync, such as airline reservations, calendaring systems and billing systems for cell phones. Customers have asked CollabNet about the implications of the change in DST to their CollabNet Enterprise Edition platform. If your site is configured to display times in one of the affected time zones, or if your desktop is set to one of these zones, you'll be pleased to know that CollabNet is upgrading all sites with the latest patches to follow the new DST rules.
Process improvement
Are you having issues identifying, estimating and tracking interdependent project tasks? Would you like to have your requirements and defect artifacts automatically show up as tasks in your integrated project plan? Using Ivis xProcess with CollabNet Enterprise Edition you can build processes, methodologies and best practices into live project plans that integrate seamlessly with CollabNet’s globally distributed development environment. Find out more and watch the new online demonstration video at http://ivis.open.collab.net.
Webcasts and events
Come see us at EclipseCon and meet CollabNet engineers and our Chief Architect. We will be at booth 415 where we will demo our integration with Eclipse.
Webinar: Subversion in the Enterprise– March 21, 2007
A CM Crossroads live webcast
http://tinyurl.com/33fq4l
Webinar: CollabNet Enterprise Edition – March 6, 2007
A low-pressure introduction to CollabNet Enterprise Edition, including key functionality and a brief outline of adopting open-source development best practices in the enterprise.
http://www.collab.net/webinar5/
Webinar: Subclipse – Tuesday March 20, 2007
An insider’s view of Subclipse, and how to use it.
http://www.collab.net/webinar7/
Recent CollabNet News
Red Herring: CollabNet Bonds Linux Vendors
http://www.redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=21349&hed=CollabNet+Bonds+Linux+Vendors
New “Open Solutions Alliance” Formed by Leading Vendors to Drive Adoption of Open Source Business Solutions
http://www.collab.net/news/press/2007/osa.html
Feedback and Suggestions
Do you have feedback and suggestions about openCollabNet or this technical newsletter? Please send an email to facilitator@open.collab.net.
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