I have used over the years many SCM tools – most of them horrible, difficult to use, etc. I have also evaluated to greater or lesser degrees almost every other tool out there.

We are a web applications company and therefore have very few compiled programs other than some Java – which are usually compiled to a working state pre-check in. Therefore, we have no true build process other than consolidating and compressing JavaScript which occurs in our integration environment.

We are also a small company – which means that productivity is of paramount importance.

I think the key Perforce feature that makes it most attractive to us is its focus on collaborative development. We service a large number of clients from a common source code framework. Any developer may be asked to work on any project at any time.

As such, as a developer, it is important for me to understand when I am making changes to a particular application – and specifically a particular file – that may require a merge. That allows me to coordinate with the other developer(s) to understand who should check-in first based on the nature of the changes, and the complexity of the merge to come. This allows us to achieve higher quality and match developer capability/understanding to the merge.

We also use Perforce’s “copy up, merge down” mantra. This forces merges at the developer’s machine, instead of requiring integration absent of the ability to test it without a fully deployed app. In other words, it requires developers to test their integrations before checking in – and improves quality as a result because every developer’s local environment is essentially an integration environment.

However, the real strength of Perforce is its integration and branch tracking, and the visual tools for representing these (time-lapse view, revision graph, file history).

In all other tools I’ve used, trying to track down the who, what, when, where and why of a particular change is a thought-intensive and time consuming process. This is may be only 5% of what you use an SCM tool to do – exception management – but it is probably closer to 50% of the time you actually spend interacting with the tool.

In Perforce, the tools to perform exception management are so strong that problems can be located, diagnosed, understood and addressed in a tiny fraction of the time required by other tools.

Despite claims to the contrary, offline development is not impossible in Perforce. We do it all the time. Yes, it requires reconciliation and thought, but with the newish workspace diff dialog ( the Reconcile Offline Work function), the thought and manual effort part of the reconciliation is minimized.

All in all, for us, Perforce makes SCM a natural and intuitive part of software development, and after walking a brief learning curve, making SCM almost second nature. It forces us all to understand the changes we are making in the context of the greater development effort, and to actually talk with each other when there are conflicts. This better aligns our own efforts with that of the team and organization, and improves quality by addressing it much sooner in the development process.

This makes our clients happy, makes us more competitive, keeps us agile, enforces accountability, produces better products, and allows us to spend more of our time developing cool software.

Isn’t that what it’s all about?

As to the original linked post, all of our developers work and from home and our entire infrastructure is collocated in a data center. We all have zero problems accessing via VPN. Granted, the original post was from 2005. But, even in 2005 we had no problems. We all have 12Mb/s DSL connections, a 10Mb/s connection at the data center, and a number of us have SonicWalls installed at our network edge for site-to-site VPN (meaning no software).

“Sorry. You do not appear to be registered with this transport. Please register and try again. If you are having trouble registering please contact your Jabber administrator”

It is very annoying”

DELETE THE CONTACT msn.jabber

# Select General -> Service Discovery
# Enter jabber.anywise.com in address and click browse

thanks so much!

I get no contact list but a new contact under “Agents/Transports” called “msn.jabber.anywise.com” instead.

I also can only log in if I choose “Encrypt connection: Legally SSL”, a little different from your description.

Anybody willing to help me with this??

Best regards,

Patrik

i have had a googlemail account for a long time (which auto gives me a google talk account) i filled in the thing exactly like you siad (and a selection of other websites said) and it doesnt work.

:’( help lol.