The Seapine View

Seapine Software has released preliminary support for Apple’s Xcode 4.2 IDE. This is a beta and a pre-release, which may be somewhat buggy.
You can obtain the installer package here:

http://downloads.seapine.com/pub/beta/scm/xcode/SurroundSCM_xCode4.2_beta.zip

Version control generally focuses on developers and code, but we often forget that other items, such as documentation, also need to be version controlled. Surround SCM includes Microsoft Office integration that enables users to work directly from Office applications, such as Microsoft Word, without needing to use the Surround SCM interface.

This video shows you how the integration works and how to do a few basic things, including viewing file history, viewing differences between document versions, and merging different versions of a document.

Any version control or configuration management software needs a good diff/merge utility. Most programmers use the diff/merge tool daily, so it’s also important for the SCM tool to support a large number of diff/merge tools.

This video shows you how to configure diff/merge settings in Surround SCM, how to use the built-in support for Araxis Merge and Guiffy, and how to use other diff/merge utilities.

Making sure that your data is backed up is a crucial part of any IT department disaster plan, but often this task is given lower priority. To make it easier, we’ve the documented the steps for you to make sure you know exactly how to back up your TestTrack and Surround SCM databases.

The following knowledgebase articles will show you what you need to back up:

• Backing up TestTrack databases
• Backing up Surround SCM 2009 and later databases

Changelists are an extremely useful feature in Surround SCM. Although changelists were initially introduced into Surround SCM to guarantee a set of actions occur atomically, they have evolved into a great way to group a set of actions together for a variety of purposes. Over time, we’ve added a number of other features that leverage changelists as a convenient grouping mechanism.
Continue reading…

Surround SCM is a full-featured configuration management solution that controls access to files and tracks changes over time. The videos and links below are provided to help new users learn more and get started with Surround SCM.

Continue reading…

The 2011.1 release of Surround SCM included a new feature that allows you to use promote and rebase as pre-event trigger actions. This makes it easy to check a certain condition and decide if you want to allow a promote or rebase to continue. The condition is evaluated on the file that contains the change that is being promoted or rebased. As an example, I’m going to show you how to prevent a promote based on file state.

This example uses a reverse waterfall branch model. Changes are checked in to a development branch and reviewed. After they are approved, the changes are promoted to a staging branch for integration testing. Once those tests pass, the changes are promoted to the production branch.

Continue reading…

In a recent post, I discussed how to use security groups in TestTrack to simplify the Item window. In this post, I’m going to cover Surround SCM security groups, specifically the permissions that control the access to files.

To access security groups go to View > Security Groups…

Understanding File Access Permissions in Surround SCM

Surround SCM provides three levels of file access permissions, and these are set for each security group.

Default Security

These are the permissions that will, by default, apply to all files on all branches and repositories. These are set on the Server Security tab of the Security Group window. Under the “Files (Default)” category you specify the file access permissions that will be the default for all branches and repositories. In the following screenshot, you’ll see that the Dev Team has all file permissions enabled except Destroy on all branches and repositories across all mainlines.

Edit Security Group Window

Continue reading…

Surround SCM users can customize their list window layout and preferred columns setup to make daily work quick and easy. This video covers Surround SCM list windows, showing basic sorting and more advanced filter capabilities.

This video takes a look at branching in Surround SCM, including the benefits of branching, a review of branch types, and how to create branches. The video also covers promoting and rebasing, which enables code to be sent up or down your branch tree while keeping track of how the code moved between branches.