VA Software: Solutions: Collaboration

Challenge: Collaboration

Collaboration is crucial for development efficiency and productivity. When people collaborate, teamwork gets better, problems are solved sooner, development proceeds faster and innovation intensifies. The Open Source community is a prime example. Despite the numerous challenges of distributed development, the Open Source community has proven that using a centralized development resource (SourceForge.net) together with new, more collaborative ways of working can drive more rapid development, better quality software and innovation.

Today, companies seeking to optimize distributed development are increasingly looking to the Open Source community for Open Source innovations and collaborative principles that can be adopted within their own organizations. But since most enterprise development organizations lack a centralized, web-accessible resource like SourceForge.net, they typically suffer from inadequate collaboration, longer development cycles, and higher costs. Key challenges include:

Geographic, time-zone, organizational and technological barriers make it harder for distributed team members to connect and share ideas, interests and expertise
Collaboration hindered by lack of a common, web-accessible "workspace", especially one that is connected with their heterogeneous development tools
Physical separation combined with disparate, heterogeneous tools create silos of information, IP and expertise, making it difficult to find and leverage the right information and/or expertise at the right time

SourceForge^® Solution

Just as SourceForge.net serves as a central enabling technology for the worldwide Open Source community, SourceForge Enterprise Edition has proven to be a key enabling technology for improving collaboration and development efficiency within distributed organizations.

"SourceForge.net has been instrumental in accelerating some of the largest, geographically-distributed development projects in the Open Source community. By selecting SourceForge Enterprise Edition, customers who have expressed an interest in geographically distributing their development teams can expect to increase productivity, enhance teamwork, and accelerate software projects for their developer communities worldwide, with the security and management visibility they require"

Scott Handy, vice president,
worldwide Linux strategy for IBM

Provides a secure, centralized web-accessible resource with network-enabled collaboration features that have been proven to work on a global scale
Common, integrated views into heterogeneous tools facilitate information access and collaboration
Pervasive search capability makes it faster and easier to find the right information and expertise when it is needed

^* SourceForge.net (www.sf.net) is the world's largest Open Source development website. SourceForge.net is where over 900,000 registered users come together to collectively develop, collaborate and innovate on over 84,000 Open Source projects. VA Software is the creator and owner of SourceForge.net. Today, SourceForge.net is operated by OSTG, Inc. (a VA Software subsidiary) as a free service to the Open Source community.