RE: Re[4]: Visual Studio integration plugin for CVS

[Arthur Barrett]

Andrei,

I think this thread is getting a little off-topic for the newsgroup.

> > Are you sure you've installed the correct package?
> 
> Download description said "CVS Client Suite + SCCI", 

Can you send me the URL where you saw this - I've looked all over and
cannot find that description on any of the downloads (but there are a
lot of them so I've probably just missed it).

> Selling product without a trial is the VERY bad practice, I think ;)

As I wrote in my previous post "We may be releasing an evaluation copy
later this week - but that will be probably be limited to work with the
new CM Server only".

I asked our sales team and they did see a message from you asking for a
trial version, however I'm told it was a very terse e-mail and gave no
indication of your number of users, server platform, client platform,
previous experience, specific evaluation critieria etc.  

Whilst our sales process probably should not care if you are interested
in 1 or 1000 users, in practice it does make a difference.  It is a
cost/benefit equation - if it will cost our sales guy a few hours and he
has to ask his boss and the total benefit will be a sales commission on
$200 (ie: not much) then there is not much incentive.  If it's only a
few hours work and a potential sale of $20,000 then it's different.

My original reply was to Frank Petrillo who it appeared to me was
looking for a recommendation from a programmer for SCCI integration that
'worked' and my reply in this newsgroup was "I know this one works
because I wrote most of it ;)" and I stand by that.  I also indicated
that the next step was to "Contact address@hidden for more info."
not look for an evaluation version.  One of the problems with
'evaluation versions' is that they are difficult to support and often if
people encounter unexpected behaviour they do not contact the vendor -
instead they complain in forums such as this one.

In the defence of the current sales model: the sales team keep the cost
of a single copy of CVS Suite down to near the price of a technical
book, which the suite also contains (All About CVS) and therefore it
should be affordable and easily justifiable to most IT departments.  

I agree that 'evaluation copies' are a must for 'single purpose'
software - which I guess is what the SCCI integration is, except that we
are not selling 'SCCI' we sell 'CVS Suite' which is a server, a
graphical client, an explorer plugin, a graphical diff tool, a release
manager, defect tracking integration, build integration and SCCI and a
technical book and support.  Again I wrote in my original post "However
the SCCI client is designed to work with the version of the CVS server
we supply as a part of the same package" so that should already be
clear.

I try not to encourage people in a belief that Software Change and
Configuration Management is a 'problem' that can be resolved by simply
clicking through an installer.  Now I'm sure this is not what you are
thinking of, you have already thought through your SCCM process and just
want to integrate that with Visual Studio.  

The final problem is that the SCCI interface was developed by Microsoft
primarily for their Visual SourceSafe product which has a particular
workflow and that workflow is almost embedded in the SCCI API, therefore
it is almost impossible to run a 'concurrent' development model using
SCCI.  Instead CVS Suite allows several models including: Distributed
Unreserved (traditional CVS), Centralised Unreserverd, Centralised
Reserved and Distributed Reserved (a VSS/PVCS type model).  By default
the SCCI plugin in CVS Suite runs the Distributed Reserved (a VSS/PVCS)
model which is what most people migrating from VSS (and hence want
VS.NET integration) expect.  This model requires the CVS Suite server
and client and the documentation so again an evaluation version would
potentially create more confusion or problems that it solves.

What I do my best to provide is server/client software change and
configuation management tools that support the widest range of business
processes (where the majority of the effort is donated as open source
code) and expert help once people have purchased support via the sales
team.

Regards,


Arthur Barrett