SourceForge Enterprise 5 Is More Customizable

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CollabNet today announced CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise 5.0, an update to its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) system featuring new user interface elements designed to provide more information on a project’s status.

The new UI elements are the primary features of emphasis in SourceForge 5.0, which CollabNet acquired from VA Software in April 2007. The new project page and project templates are designed for much greater customization than prior versions.

The upgraded project page capabilities in SourceForge Enterprise 5.0 allow teams to model and report on the different phases of the ALM process with nested pages and portlet-like components, something not possible in the previous version.

This allows for making custom project pages without any programming, to show things like status from the project, an issue tracker, a wiki or source code management tools. Information can be displayed on a dashboard or published in a custom report.

Tony Tarone, director of service operations for CEDAR Document Technologies, a document processing firm, loves the new functionality. “Version four is ok, you can do some neat stuff if you’re creative, but the version five home page is significantly more powerful for organizing information for the various audiences to get in and see what your project is doing,” he said.

“It’s much better for organizing information from the home page view than we had before, while retaining a lot of the functionality I use day in and day out to run a good portion of my company,” Tarone added.

Enhanced project templating

The other major new feature, enhanced project templating, lets developers capture and reuse both the structure and the content of existing projects from project pages, wikis, discussion forums and other workflow processes. That way when a new project is begun, a developer can simply reuse their old template and quickly set up a new project page without having to reinvent the wheel.

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