Perforce includes a basic defect tracking system called jobs. A Perforce job is a description of work to be done, such as a bug fix or a change request. Perforce's job tracking mechanism enables you to link one or more jobs to the changelists that implement the work specified in the jobs. Associating jobs with changelists helps teams know if and when work was completed, who performed the work, and what file revisions were affected by the work. Jobs linked to changelists are marked as closed when the changelist is submitted.

The types of information tracked by the jobs system can be customized; Perforce administrators can add, change, or delete fields used by Perforce jobs. See the Perforce Server Administrator's Guide: Fundamentals for details.

It is easy to integrate Perforce with third-party defect tracking and workflow systems. P4DTG, the Perforce Defect Tracking Gateway, is an integrated platform that includes both a graphical configuration editor and a replication engine. For more information, see:

http://www.perforce.com/product/components/defect_tracking_gateway

Perforce labels are sets of tagged file revisions that enable you to reproduce specific groups of files within workspaces. Labels differ from changelists in that a changelist number represents the state of all files in the depot at the time the changelist was submitted. Labels can be used to tag arbitrary groups of files, even when those file revisions represent work that was submitted in more than one changelist.

Another difference between changelists and labels is that changelists are referred to by Perforce-assigned numbers, while labels take names chosen by users. For example, you might want to tag the file revisions that compose a particular release with the label rel2.1. At a later time, you can update the revisions tagged with rel2.1 to reflect fixes performed in subsequent changelists, and retrieve all the tagged revisions into a workspace by syncing the workspace to the label.

For more about labels, see the P4 User's Guide.

Perforce applications have options that enable you to specify a preferred text editor or merge tool. For example, the Command-Line Client uses the environment variables P4EDITOR and P4MERGE to invoke a preferred editor or merge tool.

See the documentation for your Perforce application for details.

Perforce provides a protection scheme to prevent unauthorized or inadvertent access to the depot. The protections determine which Perforce commands can be run, on which files, by whom, and from which workstations. Perforce administrators can set protections by using the p4 protect command in the Perforce Command-Line Client, or by using P4Admin, the Perforce Administration Tool.

For further information, see the Perforce Server Administrator's Guide.

The shared versioning service is licensed according to how many users it supports. This licensing information resides in a file called license in the server root directory. The license file is a plain text file supplied by Perforce Software. Without the license file, the Perforce Versioning Service limits itself to either 20 users and 20 client workspaces (and unlimited files), or to an unlimited number of users and workspaces (but with a limit of 1000 files).

For further information, see the Perforce Server Administrator's Guide, or contact technical support.

To obtain online help from within all Perforce applications:

Documentation for Perforce is available on the web at:

http://www.perforce.com/documentation

The Perforce Knowledge Base; a complete list of articles is available at:

http://answers.perforce.com

The Perforce Forums are a place for users to ask questions and to hear from other users:

http://forums.perforce.com/

The perforce-user mailing list is mirrored on the Perforce Forums:

http://maillist.perforce.com/mailman/listinfo/perforce-user

Perforce support personnel are available for email and telephone support. Perforce also offers training, consulting, and other professional services. For details, see:

http://www.perforce.com/support-services