Q: What is a global development platform?
Q: What does a global development platform do for my organization?
Q: How does SourceForge provide the benefits of a global development platform?
Q: What are the key problems addressed by SourceForge?
Q: How does SourceForge work with my existing tools and processes?
Q: How does SourceForge provide enhanced IP security?
Q: Is SourceForge limited to particular target platforms or programming languages?
Q: What phases of the application lifecycle does SourceForge support?
Q: How does SourceForge Enterprise Edition differ from SourceForge.net?
Q: We currently have a dedicated document management system. Why would we use the document management capabilities in SourceForge?
Q: How can I purchase SourceForge?

Q: What is a global development platform?
A global development platform is a web-based application that provides a secure, centralized IP repository and a consolidated team workspace for both in-house and outsourced application development teams worldwide. It is an essential piece of infrastructure for leveraging global capabilities with the lowest costs, risks, and time-to-benefit.

Q: What does a global development platform do for my organization?
A global development platform like SourceForge provides a foundation for IT governance while boosting team efficiency and reducing the hidden costs associated with large teams and globally-sourced application development. It provides better visibility and control, improved IP protection, enhanced team collaboration and productivity, audit trails for regulatory compliance, and improved knowledge management. Simply put, SourceForge helps you realize better asset use efficiency by getting more out of your people, processes, products, and IP.

Q: How does SourceForge provide the benefits of a global development platform?
SourceForge provides you with a secure, centralized IP repository together with integrated project and management tools, collaboration features, and interoperability with popular third-party tools to provide you with a consolidated team workspace for accelerating and managing global development. SourceForge provides an easy-to-use platform where team members can store, share, track, and collaborate on documents, code, issues, and project activity. SourceForge connects teams with each other and the information they need, helps coordinate their efforts, and gives management real-time, detailed visibility into projects--regardless of location.

Q: What are the key problems addressed by SourceForge?
Large IT organizations with distributed teams and offshore service providers face many challenges: poor management visibility of project status and progress, inadequate collaboration and communication between teams, coordination difficulties, mismatched tools and processes, and longer project ramp-up times. SourceForge provides a common development platform with integrated tools and services to unify teams and address these issues.

Q: How does SourceForge work with my existing tools and processes?
As a web-based application, SourceForge integrates with many of your existing tools. SourceForge has built-in integrations with popular project management tools such as Microsoft® Project® and SCM tools such as IBM Rational® ClearCase®, Merant PVCS®, and others. SourceForge integrates with and enhances existing tools investments with minimal disruption.

SourceForge supports improved processes but does not force teams to comply with rigid process methodologies. SourceForge is designed to adapt to the way your teams work and to help support more mature software development processes, such as SW-CMM® Levels 2 and 3, should they be desired.

Q: How does SourceForge enhance security?
IP protection and security is a major concern, especially for organizations engaged in offshore outsourced development. SourceForge is hosted on your own server(s) and uses secure role-based access controls to set permissions for what users can see.

Q: Is SourceForge limited to particular target platforms or programming languages?
SourceForge is open in that it works with virtually any programming language, document type, or target application platform. Regardless of programming language (C/C++, Java, C#, Perl, COBOL, etc.) or target application platform (J2EE™, Microsoft® .NET, IBM® WebSphere®, BEA® WebLogic™, Linux®, Windows®, Mac OS®, etc.), SourceForge enables you to standardize on a common platform for both in-house teams and external service providers.

Q: What phases of the application lifecycle does SourceForge support?
SourceForge supports all phases of application lifecycle management--from requirements management, design, development, test, release, and maintenance. Throughout the application lifecycle, SourceForge provides a common platform (a virtual workspace) where all project team members can collaborate, communicate, share, and coordinate their efforts.

Q: How does SourceForge Enterprise Edition differ from SourceForge.net?
SourceForge.net is a publicly accessible portal for the Open Source community and is owned and operated by OSDN, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of VA Software. SourceForge Enterprise Edition was originally based on the technology that powers the SourceForge.net site and now has major feature extensions, extensive tool-to-tool integration, third-party tool support, real-time project tracking and reporting, and enterprise grade security and stability.

Q: We currently have a dedicated document management system. Why would we use the document management capabilities in SourceForge?
You can manage files within your current document management system. By placing documents within SourceForge, teams can store and manage project documents in a single repository that can be linked to many types of related project information and provide web-based access for other specified team members. With SourceForge, teams can collaborate on documents, create relationships between documents and issues, code commits, and communications, monitor changes and status of documents and relationships through automated notifications, and search any file type and content. Putting documents in SourceForge saves time by making documents more accessible and improves utility by linking them with the rest of the project.

Q: How can I purchase SourceForge?
Contact VA Software Sales at 1-877-825-4689 (toll free) or 1-510-687-7000 to speak with a SourceForge Sales Representative. Alternatively, you may send inquiries to [email protected].

Should you have additional questions about VA Software or SourceForge Enterprise Edition, complete our inquiry form or contact VA Software today toll-free at 1-877-825-4689 (or 1-510-687-7000).

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