Surround Your World

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.

My name is Jeff Amfahr, and I am the product manager for Surround SCM here at Seapine. After a groundswell of demand (thanks Dad!), I’ve decided to start writing about some of the issues exciting ideas and opportunities around SCM in general and Surround SCM in particular. In addition, I believe it’s only a matter of time before I’m slandered by Grant so I wanted to acquire my own mouthpiece. As Rupert Murdoch already snatched up the Wall Street Journal, this seemed like my best bet.

Over time, I’ll be keeping you apprised of what’s happing with the Surround product, soliciting feedback on directions and features we’re looking at and talking about some of the challenges exciting opportunities of working in this space.

Surround is a very interesting product, since we use it internally. This is a real mixed blessing. On the one hand, when things aren’t working well we feel it ourselves. I get feature requests all the time from team members. Developers “get” almost all of the use cases.

On the other hand, it’s easy to be blinded by our internal development process and use cases. “No one does it that way” and “It’s really important that XYZ be fast as people do that all the time” are easy to slip into the thought process.

I have to try and balance making features that I and other team members want/use to be perfect versus optimizing features that we don’t use, but some large part of our customer base might. And the challenge is how to find out what people are using (and why), since the feedback loop is rarely perfect. Hence, this blog as another avenue to let people in on the fun.

Hopefully you find the information here useful, as I give some additional insight into how Surround is evolving and you give me insight on how it should evolve. If nothing else, if you regularly read this as well as Grant’s postings, you run the risk might have the chance to be deposed at the inevitable lawsuit and/or criminal case.