Serena announced the Dimensions CM 14 Preview Program in a press release today, which aims to give existing customers deeper engagement with the product, in the lead up to release in April 2014. Innovations within Dimensions CM 14 extends the product’s established leadership position in performance, scalability and security, in addition to driving advances in exciting new areas such as change and branch visualization as well as support for mobile development. A private Beta Program has been running since May of this year and initial reaction from customers has been extremely positive.
Software development is a complex practice and Dimensions CM 14 goes to great lengths to simplify some of the toughest problems facing development teams. For example, the innovative approach to changesets and wizard-driven merging simplifies parallel development through our new low cost, high speed branch provisioning and baselining capabilities. This gives developers the freedom to manage changes safely in isolation, without sacrificing the control and visibility required by release managers to bring these changes together into a coherent release.
Distributed teams building multi variant software within shorter delivery cycles has become the norm. With Dimensions CM 14 developers and release managers are empowered to better understand what changes are being worked on and manage the streams of incoming requests and updates. The state-of-the-art ability to visualize changes and code branches across multiple projects, platforms and locations will enable teams to streamline the delivery of code changes in a process that is consistent and easily managed. Visual change history facilitates contextual and meaningful cross-team collaboration. Direct integration with popular continuous integration tools further ensure that release readiness and the health of builds are instantly visible at all times.
Developers of mobile apps will be excited to learn about the new Subversion bridging capability, which enables Dimensions CM clients to support integrations built for Subversion, including xCode and AppCelerator. A new annotation view will enable teams to analyze the historic context of code changes down to the specific lines of code. This capability greatly improves trouble shooting and reduces the risks associated with updating legacy code. In addition, new integrated peer review capabilities will ensure that only the highest quality change submissions end up as part of the build. Dimension CM’s approach to peer review emphasizes team work and the sharing of best practices, which in turn promotes “good citizenship” amongst developers.
Dimensions CM 14 is not just good news for developers. Administrators will appreciate the simplified approach to global enterprise rollout and upgrades. The automatic upgrade of clients and agents will make Dimensions CM 14 the easiest release ever to keep up to date. Beta Program participants are already reporting 10 times faster file retrieval over previous versions, using the new Personal Library Cache Directory (PLCD) technology over a WAN.
The newly announced Preview Program is designed to further extend our customer validation efforts, ensuring value for developers and administrators alike, in addition to bringing to market a high quality release. Upon approval of your registration, Serena will provide further details of the Preview Program, such as invitation-only Webinars, early product demonstrations and an opportunity to enroll in the Open Beta program.
