In my first post Subversion Is Not Just For Developers (Part 1), I shared the stories of folks who emailed CollabNet about how they were using the platform for projects other than software development. In this blog, I want to clear up some confusion about the mention of discussion forums and other tools, and introduce TeamForge .

Subversion is software that enables you to keep track of many versions of a document or entire project, and to allow for team collaboration. This is useful not just to software developers, but for people in many walks of life. You can, for instance, have many iterations of a single document, or for the parts of a complex project such as all that's involved in coordinating an orchestra concert, or scripts to a play.

In Part 1 of this blog, I also mentioned some folks who used discussion forums and wikis. Subversion itself does not provide those tools, but TeamForge does. When you add TeamForge to Subversion, you get a wonderful suite of tools that allow communication for collaboration, notes, documentation, as well a visual interface that makes all of that easy to use.

Below is a diagram that illustrates how Subversion , TeamForge, and the tools fit together:

In the diagram above, you see what you get when you are using TeamForge. You start with your Workspace, which allows you to get to Community & Projects that includes all the tools you see listed down the right hand side of the image. Underlying this is Subversion (shown in the middle), a repository that allows for code, or artifacts kept in another database. and whatever components make up your project. In addition, the tools also provide a task tracker, real-time reports and project status, a wiki, and a documents areas which can store 300+ file types.

The TeamForge platform makes it easier for non-developers to use this software for any kind of project, to communicate with others who contribute to the project, and ways of tracking the project components.

More Information:

• OCN Community
• Subversion
• TeamForge