Category: Version Everything
May 11, 2012
It's good to be back in Chicago! I spent a lot of time here in college; I'd drive down from Michigan with some friends to enjoy the food and nightlife. If you've never been, Chicago has a really vibrant downtown. When the sun is shining on Lake Michigan, it's hard to beat the scene on Lakeshore Drive. It was also good to catch up with some of the crew working on Chronicle; they gave a talk at CMS Expo today.
I had a great chat with someone who works at a firm that makes very cool modeling and analysis software. I got my degree in electrical engineering, so I have a soft spot for image processing geeks. We were swapping some stories about the early days of our careers. It is strange how rapidly the software development field is changing. Aside from a few grey hairs, and the fact that I really enjoy talking about the weather sometimes, nothing makes me feel old like telling war stories from ten years ago. But the whole development ecosystem has gone through a wrenching transformation in a fairly short amount of time. We've...
May 10, 2012
The Perforce Road Show rumbled through Austin this week, running smack dab into a Texas-sized spring thunderstorm. You know you're flying into Texas weather when your drink flies off your tray from the turbulence. But that didn't stop us from enjoying some of Austin's great restaurant and nightlife scene.
Two interesting questions came up during the networking hour. During my talk I had introduced some of the 2012.1 releases's great new solutions for coordinating distributed development, including replication improvements and P4Sandbox. The first question is, what's Perforce doing to make the administrator's job easier as all of these new solutions are put into a real environment? That's certainly an active topic back in the office. Quite a few of us have done the "Perforce guy" job, so we know what it means to deploy proxy servers with Windows registry configuration. We're conducting some research to figure out what the next generation of Perforce administration tools needs to look like. That could involve improvements to P4Admin, different interfaces...
May 04, 2012
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We wrapped up the second stop on the Perforce Road Trip yesterday in beautiful San Diego. If you've never been there, you're missing one of the most scenic downtowns in the world. Just standing at the foot of Broadway you can see cruise ships, aircraft carriers, a naval air station, Coronado, and Point Loma. And that's without turning your head.
Mark Harrison gave a great talk on the interesting things that Pixar does with Perforce. Mark's a very funny speaker, and he had some great lines. Paraphrasing a personal favorite: "We reached back to high school math and realized that downloading a terabyte would take about 1,000 times longer than a gigabyte."
I think the custom application that Pixar built to support their artists is a great illustration of why Perforce is building Commons. As Mark said, their artists need version management: Pixar is on a 50-year planning horizon for keeping their data safe. But of course an artist isn't going to use the same tools as a software...
May 02, 2012
Whew, busy day! Today well over a hundred Perforce users joined us at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View to get a taste of new Perforce products and solutions, including Commons, Chronicle, and P4Sandbox.
What really struck me is how much everyone can identify with the problems we're seeing. Emails, network drives, all these different places that make it easy to lose track of important data. Pretty much everyone starts nodding their head when they hear about Commons: a simple, safe place to store files and collaborate with a team. Coming as most of us do from a software background, that sounds prosaic in a way. Using a good version management system for source code is part of our DNA now as an industry.
But the tools and the process that we take for granted in software just doesn't exist yet in other parts of the company. I can say this from experience. When I first started working in the marketing department, I was frankly shocked at how hard it was to collaborate on documents, slide decks, and spreadsheets. We have plenty of...
Apr 30, 2012
“Trying to find key information” is listed as the second highest time-waster on the infographic “5 Things That Waste Your Time at Work”. In this article, I’ll describe version management’s role in organizing a subset of that key information, which I describe as the problem of variant copies.
When you have multiple, differing, related, and unmanaged copies of a document, you have what I call variant copies of a document. Version management tracks the relationships between all the variant copies, at which point we can call them versions of the document.
But enough with semantic hair-splitting! What I’d really like to talk about is how we often think of a document as a single entity, when typically it actually exists as a number of unmanaged variant copies. Those variant copies are a source of trouble: not the least of which is they form an impediment to...
Apr 19, 2012
When we changed the Perforce tagline to “Version Everything” last fall, we thought it would help set the stage for new capabilities, features and products we’ll deliver in the months and years ahead. And while some might have found the term aspirational, a recent survey shows it’s actually not far from the current reality.
To see how much of “everything” our customers are versioning with Perforce, we conducted a simple online survey. We asked our customers what kinds of digital assets they’re storing in Perforce. More than 1,200 responses later, we found some very interesting results. As you’ll see in the chart below, Perforce is used to version much more than source code. Customers across any number of industries are using Perforce for any variety of business and technical documents as well as images and photos, web content, 3D/CAD design, multimedia, integrated circuit designs…the list goes on.
The survey also shows that we could just as easily have made our tagline “Everyone Version Everything.” We asked...
Apr 17, 2012
Coming soon to a city near you—the Perforce Version Everything Road Trip!
Time to pack up the camper van and put the newspaper on hold. We’re soon to embark on an extended road trip to get more quality face time with our customers and partners. On May 1, we’ll begin our much-anticipated nine-city Version Everything Road Trip, making stops across the U.S. and parts of Europe.
Sign up today for the event nearest you.
These events will feature presentations by Perforce executives and customers alike. We’ll provide demonstrations of new capabilities, give an overview of our product roadmap and share information on exciting new products that will help customers like you version everything across your enterprise.
- Catch the keynote speech by CEO Christopher Seiwald on how Enterprise Version Management is transforming the way companies do business.
- Learn how leading Perforce customers like...
