Ringo Consultants turned to Dynamsoft's newest source control solution
INDUSTRY:
Insurance, Finance
QUOTE
Basically, Dynamsoft's SourceAnywhere solution does as advertised. It’s powerful but also simple to use. Ultimately it helps us organize projects and related code across various teams. Efficiency and productivity have certainly improved since we started using it. We particularly appreciate how simple and quick it is to get up to speed – there’s practically no learning curve to start using it."
Ian Thomas
Managing Director, Ringo Consultants
SUMMARY
Ringo Consultants is a UK-based IT consultancy covering a variety of IT and application development needs for various small and large businesses. This includes the development of and management and maintenance of client-server and web-based applications. Over the years, the various projects and related code versions, as well as other relevant files, began to pile up. They were all in a central repository without any organization. It started to produce inefficiencies just in finding a project to start or continue work. After researching many source control options, the company turned to Dynamsoft's newest source control solution. The team has instantly realized how well Dynamsoft's SourceAnywhere™ application works. All of the company’s projects and code were quickly well organized.
THE COMPANY
Ringo Consultants is a UK-based IT consultancy covering a variety of IT and application development needs, primarily for the insurance and finance industries. Founded in 1995, the consultancy has worked with clients on systems design, structured database design and database migrations, one-shop web-based solutions, client-server Microsoft® technologies, structured testing solutions, and full systems maintenance and support. Ringo Consultancy counts numerous small businesses and household brand names as current or past customers. They include London City Pool, Physiosure.com, Citibank, Hewlett Packard®, Shell® and more.
THE PROBLEM
Ringo Consultants works with various clients on client-server and web-based application development projects. Over the years, the various projects, code versions for these projects, and other related files, began to pile up. All files were essentially in a central repository without any organization. It quickly started to produce inefficiencies just in finding a project to start or continue work. If something wasn’t done soon, collaboration would also start to suffer.
The company knew it had to employ a source control solution. They had previously used a very old version (2002) of source control software from Dynamsoft. To start the research, the team of developers at Ringo Consultants first looked at a variety of other version control options: Vault™, Subversion™, GitHub™, were a few considered. The Ringo Consultancy team agreed the applications researched so far all required too much technical know-how. A better option was needed.
THE SOLUTION
The consultancy again turned to Dynamsoft to see if the newest version of the company’s source control software would provide what they needed. The team researched Dynamsoft's SourceAnywhere application and quickly found it provided the strong project management and source code management required. The team also found the application to be easy to use. It helped to have previous familiarity with Dynamsoft's solution, although it was more than a decade ago.
Dynamsoft developed its SourceAnywhere solution to deliver several advantages for its customers. The latest on-premise version is SourceAnywhere 6.0. New features include project branch and merge capabilities to enable better parallel code development and management amongst teams. Programmers can create project branches to work on different development paths and merge the changes when ready. The branching can be done by latest version, a specified historical version, or a labelled version. There is also a new wizard-based merge feature. It lets users merge code changes from a source branch to target branch. The changes can be auto-merged or resolved manually if any conflicts happen. Before a merge, users can compare the source/target branch version to the base version and also compare a source to target to see the differences.
More recent changes in September 2014 expanded upon this. Folder-level branch and merge have been improved with a type of merge, recover and edit mode. Merge results can also be exported. The interface for the project and file branches was also improved.
SourceAnywhere also provides 64-bit server support, which allowed the software to handle 500+ concurrent worldwide connections. This also improved memory availability and parallel processing performance compared to a 32-bit environment. The software can be used within various integrated development environments (IDE). These include Visual Studio®, Eclipse™, Dreamweaver® and other IDEs compatible with Microsoft® Source Code Control Interface (MSSCCI). SourceAnywhere provides a simple and cost-effective source control solution, and a replacement for VSS users, for small businesses or large enterprises.
http://www.dynamsoft.com/Products/version-control-source-control-sourceanywhere.aspx
THE BENEFITS
Ringo Consultancy has plans to take advantage of SourceAnywhere’s ability to seamlessly integrate with useful IDEs. The team is looking to integrate with Dreamweaver™, in addition to other developer applications it uses. The team has instantly realized how well Dynamsoft's solution works. The team, its projects and code are now well organized. Ringo Consultancy is able to easily manage source code between developer teams, between release environments, and for multiple projects.