Surround Your World

Like everyone else, the state of the economy is something I watch. And lately its felt like watching a slow motion car crash. I can’t look away and yet I can’t really do anything either. Some days I feel like I’m watching from the curb, and other days I’m strapped to the hood.

Despite that, Seapine Software in general and Surround SCM sales in particular are doing well. We’ve had good growth each month this year, and good growth from last year. I’d like to believe that this is due exclusively to outstanding product management. A steady and seasoned hand at the wheel, guiding Surround through the rocky shoals of a troubled economic sea. I’d like to believe that, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms by everyone around me that it just isn’t so. There even seems to be small but vocal minority that believes we’re succeeding despite product management, not because of it. Apostates.

More likely is that it has something to do with the concepts discussed in this white paper “Quality-Centric Application Lifecycle Management in a Down Economy.” I think many companies have gotten savvy to the fact that when the economy is tight, people want to make sure the things they spend money are worth the cost. And that means people raise their quality expectations.

I have a friend who is a CFO, and one of his sayings (besides “Cash is King”) is “Revenue covers a multitude of sins”. When revenues are down, companies demand the highest quality. I think people understand this, and want to make sure that the products they produce have as few problems with them as possible, to ensure that every sales goes well and every customer is a happy one.

That’s where Seapine comes in. Our products are all about making you more productive, producing higher quality products so you can survive and grow during tough periods. I’d really encourage you to take a look at the white paper I referenced above. This is especially true if your company is looking at some belt tightening and every project and activity is under scrutiny. This is a time when you need to increase quality, because you can’t afford a frustrated customer. You can’t afford inefficient processes that lack repeatability and reliability.

I can’t directly change the state of the world wide economy, but I can try and make sure that our customers have the kind of sales growth that we are experiencing. Because the only thing worse that being in a slow motion crash, is knowing that you could have avoided it.

I’d like to draw your attention to an area of Seapine’s web site you may not be aware of. Seapine has a lab site at http://labs.seapine.com, where we post things that aren’t supported yet but might make your life easier. The Surround area has some nice tips and discussions about how some things work, and some scripts and add-ons that you might find interesting.

For the Macintosh users in the audience (we’re the ones looking all smug and superior till we have to connect to our companies Exchange server), I’d like to draw your attention to some AppleScripts written by yours truly. The first is here and provides some instructions on how to use Microsoft Word on the Mac for merging and diffing documents. In addition, this has some AppleScripts for adding common Surround commands to the Word menu on the Mac.

For everyone, there is also a python script to provide a rudimentary annotate function. And this is a whole set of sample trigger scripts. You may even find a set of Window batch commands for putting Surround reports on your web site.

Since this is the lab area, some things can be a little raw. And don’t be surprised if you blow the dust off a link and find something that now is incorporated in the product. But hopefully this is a collection of tricks and scripts which can make your use of Surround that much better. Feel free to wander around the lab, and take anything you like. Just don’t put anything you find there in your mouth. Those AppleScripts can leave a nasty aftertaste.

Security in an application is one of those things that rarely gets discussed in a demo. Most people say “we have excellent security control” and then move on to some alluring graphical drag and drop functionality.

But security is something that lots of applications get wrong, for lots of different reasons. First, I should say that I’m not a security expert. I read Bruce Schneier’s blog and newsletter (so should you), along with all his books.

With that said, I know that real security is hard. And one of the things to understand about Surround SCM is that the security we focus on is the internal security of the application. That is, how do we prevent users once they have authenticated themselves (either using our internal authentication or an enterprise solution like LDAP or Active Directory, both of which we integrate with) from doing things they should not do.

My mental model for this is primarily that our administrators are using our security settings to either make their users lives easier or prevent them from doing things they didn’t mean to do. For example, restricting users access to some branches and repositories is often used as a way to limit the list of branches that people have to choose among. Restricting their ability to permanently remove files prevents them from doing something that really needs a whole lot of thought first and probably isn’t what you want to do.

That doesn’t mean that our security isn’t for preventing evil doers from, well, doing evil. It is. But I think most of our customers are less focused with bad users and more with mistaken users.

I’ve been looking at other products in our space, and I’m often surprised to see the approach they take to security. Either they do very little, or they require you to write custom code to accomplish what you want. One company asks you to write Perl scripts in order to enforce restrictions on commands . Now, in theory, that is very powerful. You could write your script to make sure that only users whose last name begins with Q can destroy files, and only on alternate Thursdays. That is, if you need that. And can write Perl. And can debug Perl (clearly a separate skill from writing Perl, based on my observation.) And you want to spend your time writing and debugging Perl scripts rather than, oh, I don’t know, working on the things that make your company money.

I recently saw a presentation from another company that said over 5 years only 10%-15% of the total cost of ownership of an SCM system is license fees. I’m willing to bet that if you skip looking at how security works in some other SCM system, at least some of that other 85% will be spent on liquor to help you through those Perl debugging sessions. But just look at how cool drag and drop is!

It’s not unusual for someone to suggest a feature which, in fact, we already have. It’s not even all that unusual for that person to be using the version of the software that has that feature. So I thought I would take a few minutes to point out some features in Surround that you may have forgotten, or missed during an upgrade.

Repository differences

This was mentioned in our last newsletter but I think it’s worth pointing out again. The Repository Differences window shows the difference between the server repository and your local working directory. This includes files that are missing from your working directory as well as files in your working directory not in Surround. It can even do this recursively. Check out the newsletter or the user documentation.

View/Edit file options

If you don’t want to use the internal viewer or editor for files, you can easily customize what to do using your user preferences. If you have a favorite XML editor, for example, you can tell Surround to use that when double clicking on an XML file. This is especially useful for text files, which all default to the internal editor.

File list and Repository menu

Speaking of user preferences, you can customize the list of items in the context menu for files and repositories. That way, if there are some actions you rarely perform (like sharing files) you can remove the clutter from those menus. This is also a great chance to take a look at some items like the new Open Containing Folder feature we added in Surround 2008.1.

Changelists

Although one of the primary uses of changelists is to guarantee a set of actions occur atomically, they are also a great way to group a set of actions together and give them a name. Unlike a lot of other SCM systems, Surround allows you to give changelists a human-readable name. Then, if you ever need to know “what were all the things I did to address this request” you can pull up your list of committed changelists and see.