Configuration Management Tool

[Weaju]

We have used EA for nearly a year and are looking for a Configuration Management tool. Preferably one that works well with EA.  Any suggestions?

[potterm]

Weaju,

I believe the CM facilities in EA have been designed to work with Microsoft Visual Source Safe (VSS).  

Whichever tool you use must offer an MS SCC compliant API to EA in order to work.

We have tried EA with CVS, which by default doesn't offer a SCC API.  However, there are a number of SCC to CVS bridge components available that you can use.  Currently we are evaluating the use of CVSNT (www.cvsnt.org) with the PushOK SCC-CVS bridge (www.pushok.com).  There are other bridging components available (mostly freeware), but the PushOK component seems to work the best, and its very cheap ($19).

I think you can get similar bridging components for RCS as well.

I haven't used VSS myself, but there are some considerations if you decide to use it:

• Cost - CVS is free to use of course which is not the case with VSS.
  
• Flexibility - VSS doesn't support branching whereas CVS does.  This may not be important to you now, but could be a consideration downstream.
  
• Open - the VSS repository format is closed (it uses a binary repository file format AFAIK).  This isn't the case with CVS which stores CIs in a normal folder in the filesystem.
  
• Speed & Reliability - VSS uses windows file sharing to support multi-user access.  Other systems like CVS use a dedicated server process which (IMO) gives better performance and reliability.
  

Hope that's of some help.

Martin.

[sperry]

You may also want to look at some products from SourceGear.  They provide two products, SourceOffSite and SourceGear Vault.  Both of these products have full support for the VSS interface.  

SourceOffSite is a server based tool that interfaces with an existing VSS repository.  It speeds access to the repository specifically for remote development.  But I have also found it to be a much faster interface than accesing the repository directly.

SourceGear Vault will import your VSS Repository and store it in SQL Server.  It provides a Web Services Interface that is accessed with a VSS compatible interface on the workstation.  It is also much faster than VSS and it eliminates the file share repository requirements.  It will also import existing VSS repositories, including all history.

VSS is also included as part of Visual Studio .NET 2003.

-SP