Bluetide Chooses Dynamsoft Over Microsoft SourceSafe

Since opening its doors in 2004, Bluetide Management has shared its sales and marketing expertise with established players like Borland and Business Objects as well as up-and-comers like InfoGenesis. Last year, the company launched its flagship software product Bluetide Forecasting, a sophisticated sales forecasting solution for small and mid-sized technology companies.

With his software team working overtime on the new release, Bluetide's CTO Ryan Marples needed a reliable, high performance source code version control system to manage and secure Bluetide's code base. Having been under whelmed by Microsoft SourceSafe in the past, he decided to try Dynamsoft's SQL-based SourceAnywhere Standalone as an alternative.

Better Performance for Faster Development

Though it's used by thousands of developers around the world as the de facto version control solution for Visual Studio, Microsoft SourceSafe falls short in some key areas—one of them is performance. When Marples used SourceSafe on past software projects he tolerated sluggish performance. "There's certainly a real slowdown that occurs with SourceSafe," he said.

In response to the SourceSafe slowdown, Dynamsoft focused on making sure its solution out-performs other version control products. SouceAnywhere Standalone's accelerated speed is accomplished via a cache mechanism within the server that reduces hard disk operations and the number of SQL requests by up to 80%. An optional cache server further reduces server workload and accelerates processing. Marples agrees SourceAnywhere Standalone is faster. "As our code repository grows, SourceAnywhere Standalone continues to operate quickly and responsively," said Marples. "It gives us a tremendous speed advantage."

Know Your Code is in Good Hands

When code corruption occurs development teams lose valuable work—a problem Marples experienced with Microsoft SourceSafe. "Data corruption happens all too often with SourceSafe," he says. "It adds to the workload and slows down the team. It's just a frustrating experience."

Dynamsoft knows developers are more productive when they're focused on writing code and not continually checking database integrity or worrying about code corruption. To achieve a solid, and reliable offering, SourceAnywhere Standalone stores all repository data on Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005. It uses database atomic transaction for data integrity. "With SourceAnywhere Standalone we know our code is in good hands. In fact, since we've been using SourceAnywhere our data has never corrupted. Not once," said Marples.

Security with Built-in Encryption and Project Permissions

When it comes to security, SourceSafe falls short in two ways. First, it grants universal permissions for every user at file system level. Even if users only require read permission for a single file, read and write access to the entire SourceSafe folder is required. This means a user can copy, modify or in the worst case delete the SourceSafe repository. Second, SourceSafe's remote access mode exposes the entire file system to the public, which leaves the repository open to attacks.

Alternatively, SourceAnywhere's remote access feature uses a client/server architecture that does not publicly expose the file system. Only the SourceAnywhere Standalone server interface is ever exposed.

SourceAnywhere Standalone also allows administrators to assign granular access privileges for each user, which minimizes the chance that employees will accidentally or malevolently modify source code they shouldn't be working on.

"The ability to control user privileges within SourceAnywhere gives me peace of mind regarding the overall stability of our repository. It eliminates accidental changes or updates to the wrong area," said Marples.

Marples' confidence is further buoyed by SourceAnywhere's built-in SSL and Blowfish encryption, plus support for certification authorities and sophisticated password policy.

Seamless Migration from SourceSafe

Transitioning a development team from a ubiquitous product like Microsoft SourceSafe to something new may seem more problematic than living with poor performance or code corruption. With this in mind, Dynamsoft promises a seamless migration from SourceSafe. SourceAnywhere Standalone's user interface strongly resembles Source Safe, and its SourceSafe data import tool lets users migrate an entire project or database. As a result, new users up to speed quickly and make the switch from SourceSafe as painless as possible. "As SourceSafe users, we've found the transition to SourceAnywhere to be completely painless. Quick adoption for new team members meant less training time and better productivity."

As Bluetide's code repository grows, Marples is confident SourceAnywhere Standalone can do the job. "SourceAnywhere lets us easily and effectively manage our code in a faster, more secure, and more flexible way than Microsoft SourceSafe did," he said.

About Dynamsoft

Dynamsoft Corporation is the leading developer of version control and issue tracking software.

Many Fortune 500 companies including HP, IBM and Intel use Dynamsoft solutions for version control, issue tracking.

www.dynamsoft.com