Starting to work with a new SCM solution is a big step. This is why a lot of effort has been put into giving you a jump start. PureCM installs in minutes and imports existing CVS, Perforce, Subversion and Visual Source Safe repositories to preserve your history. Concise 'Getting Started' hints provide guidance when you need it most, allowing you start working with PureCM in no time.
Once you have imported your files, use the 'Streams' view to organise your projects. As PureCM's repositories scale to multi-terabyte, you can put virtually everything under version control. Thanks to PureCM's stream-based branching, you can create as many streams as you want without bloating your repository. Streams remember their hierarchy, making it much easier for you to keep track of your branches - but you will see that soon.
To start working, create a workspace to isolate your changes from your colleagues'. The workspace view is designed as a Change Management Cockpit to give a developer maximum insight into his own, as well as his team's past and ongoing work. As a developer, you can organise your own changes in changesets, create checkpoints, preview changesets submitted by your colleagues, and automatically integrate them into your workspace at your discretion.
To keep your data safe, all transactions in PureCM are applied atomically, thus completely or not at all. This avoids corruption to your server database, e.g. in case of an interrupted network connection.
Use the PureCM Stream Comparer to check differences between your workspace and the server, or between any two branches or folders. Added, changed or deleted files and folders are colour coded, giving you direct access to the diff dialogue showing the differences in detail.
With PureCM Professional, parallel development and merging is as simple as you can ask for. By creating Merge Paths, you can enable real-time tracking of pending and merged changes between any two streams. PureCM even supports automatic merging between streams, if you wish to do so. Just go to the 'Merging' view to manage your Merge Path Properties.
Say you have made two bug fixes on your feature stream. Thanks to real-time tracking, the changes are immediately listed as pending on the integration stream. From there, merging the changes is just a click away. Suddenly, struggling to keep branches in sync has become a thing of the past!
PureCM fully integrates with Visual Studio, Eclipse and any other tool supporting the SCC interface. Developers are enabled to perform advanced and day-to-day source control operations within their IDE. This makes it easy for your team to get started, allowing them to focus on what they need to do: developing solutions.
PureCM Professional comes complete with fully integrated issue management. Define your workflow and let developers link their changes to bug reports and change requests. This gives you better control for large or distributed teams, while allowing for better transparency and easier status reporting. If you would like to link in your existing issue tracking tool, just use one of the out-of-the-box integrations or PureCM's .NET or Java SDK.
Your SCM tool needs to be easy to install and easy to use - but what about administration overhead? PureCM is known to need less than one administrator for hundreds of users, thanks to its policy-based administration. Read and write policies can be defined on any level, from repository to stream, folder and file level, including inheritance for easy administration. Global policies and user administration are both available on repository, group and user level, giving you full control about data access.
Even when setting up one or more Proxy Servers to cache data for distributed teams, all administration of PureCM is centralised and simple to handle.
