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

Recently I read through examples from users of Subversion who had written to CollabNet. Not surprisingly, many were developers, but what fascinated me were that many of the folks are using this software for other creative purposes.

 The ability Subversion gives one to track and rollback document versions, to allow for team collaboration, to have discussions, share related documents, and to track changes all in one application is not only important to developers, but to people of all walks of life.

All of the stories were interesting, but here are a few I thought I’d share:

• A composer and orchestrator uses Subversion for the daunting task of keeping track of all the musical elements in a production, starting with the composer’s sketches, incidental music, when the orchestrator adds orchestrations, or when the copyists prepare parts for the orchestra.
• A garage band uses Subversion to track contributions from their home recording studios.
• A family with relatives spread across the US, uses Subversion to share photos, documents, wiki blogs, all based on a central server set up by one of the family members.
• A well-known university uses Subversion to include institutional research projects, their annual Quality Issues Forum, and to maintain the materials for their training programs. In addition, they manage the development of the next iteration of the University's strategic plan, with discussions using the forums.
• A teacher is using it to allow her students to create projects, include research notes and documentation, as well as to have discussions about each student project. It is a virtual classroom in combination with her in-person classroom.

These and other stories made me realize the wonderful potential Subversion has for business uses to track important documents, court cases, and for hobbyist projects, family vacations, not to mention my own work as Community Manager.

I’m looking at the CollabNet site now and seeing that we have not sufficiently addressed the non-developer user of Subversion, and I hope we can encourage developers to keep non-developers in mind when they create add-ons and integrations for Subversion.

I welcome your ideas on how we can make the non-developer users of Subversion a part of our community, and I’d like to hear from non-developers so we can better address their needs on the website.

To learn about the discussion forum and other tools, read Subversion Is Not Just For Developers (Part 2)

dnourie @ collab.net (no spaces)