Perforce releases new version of its Software Configuration Management (SCM) system for electronics designers

“We are constantly working to respond to our customers’ needs and this release offers an array of important new capabilities that appeal to both large and small development teams,” said Kathy Baldanza, vice president of engineering at Perforce Software. “Shelving improves team collaboration and facilitates code review, additional offline capabilities make users more productive while working disconnected from their servers, and we’ve added real-time replication capabilities to improve overall system performance and data protection.”

With the new shelving feature, developers can cache modified files in the Perforce Server without first having to check them in as a versioned change.

With Perforce Shelving, users can view both active work in progress and files that are on-hold.

Shelving improves team collaboration and gives developers more flexibility in managing multiple projects. For example, Perforce Shelving allows users to:

· Pass pending changes to managers as part of Code Review or Approval workflows,

· Share work-in-progress with another team member or workstation,

· Make a change and then test in a distributed build environment, and

· Put aside an effort because a higher priority task arrived.

Shelving is supported by the 2009.2 Perforce Server, and the visual and command-line clients.

New features improve developer productivity while working offline

Developers can now work disconnected, with all file changes and history preserved when the user comes back online. With the Perforce Visual Client, users can easily edit any file taken offline, add new files, and mark existing files for deletion. Sequential changes can be scheduled for submission to the server, simplifying reconciliation of changes made when connectivity is restored.

Real-time replication of metadata improves system performance and data protection

Perforce provides an automated mechanism for copying metadata from one server to another. This improves overall system performance by allowing administrators and developers the ability to run reports and database queries on the secondary server, rather than consuming resources on the primary one.

This new replication feature also ensures data protection by playing an important role in customers’ High Availability/Disaster Recovery (HADR) strategy to provide continuous access to Perforce. This can help eliminate costly downtime in the event of a planned or unplanned outage by enabling continuous data availability.