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Eric Sink, Company Founder
Anybody see Groundhog Day?
Bill Murray plays this guy who is stuck in some sort of time loop, forced to live the same cold winter day over and over for apparently hundreds of years. It’s one of my favorite movies.
And winter in Illinois has felt just like that. It started early, sometime in November, so I thought it only fair that it would end early. No such luck. I am writing these words on Wednesday the 8th of April. Monday morning we woke up to snow.
Snow. On the 6th of April. What’s up with that?
Unlike Phil Connors in the movie, I’m pretty sure spring is going to arrive eventually. But I feel like we’ve been waiting for spring for hundreds of years.
But this spring looks like it is going to be worth the wait. The Masters starts tomorrow, and Tiger Woods is back. The new X-Men movie opens in about 3 weeks. Star Trek is a week after that. And Terminator Salvation is a week after that. Life in the spring is good.
Here at SourceGear, springtime 2009 is coinciding with the endgame for several of our product release cycles.
DiffMerge 3.3 was released just today. This no-cost tool has become one of the most popular pieces of software in SourceGear’s 12-year history.
Beta releases of Vault 5 and Fortress 2 are going to be available sometime next week. SourceOffSite 5 is coming along nicely as well. All three of these releases are filled with new features and improvements you have been asking us for.
The endgame is my favorite part of the software product cycle. For a software company, shipping products to customers is what it’s all about. Lots of other stuff matters, but not unless we can put good stuff in the hands of our customers.
So I’m excited. The end is in sight for all three of these new versions. Sometime this summer, we’re going to release a bunch of cool new stuff for you to use. That’s what it’s all about.
But if I’m still using my snow shovel in July, then I’m going to be seriously disappointed.
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Paul Roub
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Hot off the presses! We’ve just released SourceGear DiffMerge v3.3.
Smarter folder comparisons; 64-bit Windows Explorer integration; Fedora Linux support; and more.
For all the details, see the release notes — or just go ahead and download DiffMerge — it’s completely free, as always.
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Paul Roub
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SourceOffSite 5: Better, Stronger, Faster.
We’re going to make working with VSS even faster… and maybe even… fun.
It’s coming soon, and it’s a free upgrade if you purchase SOS 4 now.
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Jeremy Sheeley, Development Manager
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Since we introduced Vault years ago, one of the most requested features has been “Shelve”. Shelve is the ability to take a set of pending changes in your working folder and upload them to a holding area on the server. When the changes are shelved, they don’t impact the repository (shelved changes aren’t included in a get-latest), and can easily be shared with coworkers for code review.
The best analogy I’ve been able to come up with for Shelve involves pizza (and don’t all the best analogies involve food?).
Pretend that coding a new feature is like making pizza on a countertop that has room for exactly one pizza. You’re happily working on your pizza, and have just gotten the sauce on, but not yet the cheese, when a urgent order comes in that must be done now. Finishing your current pizza is not an option, so you have two options, the oven (checking in to the repository) or the trash (overwriting your changes). In this analogy, the benefit of adding Shelve becomes apparent. You can put your current pizza on the shelf and come back to it when the urgent order is done.
If you want to see the user documentation that we’ve done for shelve, as well as screenshots, please visit the Development Blog
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Jeremy Sheeley, Development Manager
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As most of you know, Vault started its life as “a compelling replacement to Visual SourceSafe”. VSS influenced the feature set of Vault, and we’ve had a full-history import from VSS since day one. For our next version, we’re introducing a brand new VSS import feature that will make Vault the simplest and fastest way to replace VSS.
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Paul Roub, Product Manager
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Something I should not probably not admit publicly: until recently, our website was not version-controlled.
There, I’ve said it.
If you’re using Dreamweaver, especially on a Mac, you’ll be interested to see what Vault 5 has in store for you, and how it solved our problem.
For all the details, read on over here
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John O'Neill, VP of Sales
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As the only sales guy at a company full of famous developers, it can sometimes be a challenge to stay on message.
I’m responsible for selling SourceGear products. It’s my job to get the word out to customers - on how much better our products meet their needs than (say) VSS and TFS, on the exciting new features in Vault 5.0, Fortress 2.0 and SourceOffsite 5.0, and on special promotions.
Last month we produced the first e-mail promotional flyer in company history. Some of you may have already seen it - it featured a 40% discount for new licenses and upgrades to SourceGear Fortress, and went out to select customers who’ve already asked us about Vault and Fortress. We spent a lot of time carefully crafting a product message without a lot of clutter. It was simple, direct; concisely communicating why we think Fortress is the best Application Lifecycle Management tool for small and mid-size teams.
We ran it past Eric Sink and the team of elite developer geniuses who run SourceGear. The response came back on a single Post-it note:
“Great Idea. Needs more Robots.”
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