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For many IT departments, especially those of larger companies
and organisations, finding a practical way of dealing with the myriad of change management issues is a daunting task. Get it wrong and the business consequences can be severe. Tony Stevenson balances up the options.

Further complications to successful change management arise when employees and staff are located in more than one geographical location. Seapine Software offers a solution with its, “Seapine CM Complete Software Change and Issue Management” software.

This particular product’s strength is that it actually consists of two tools that have been designed to work together seamlessly. The first of these tools is Surround SCM, a configuration management tool, while the second one is TestTrack Pro, an issue tracking tool. The combination of these two tools represents a complete change management solution.

When used together, these tools can be effective in managing change right across the entire development lifecycle, regardless of how complicated any of the projects being undertaken may be. Examples of just two of the many tasks that can be achieved with these Seapine tools include the tracking of bugs and the handling of user requests for software changes and upgrades.

The deployment of Seapine CM means that IT personnel will always have access to data that tells them what changes were made, and most importantly, why those changes were approved and implemented.

Another major benefit is that the Surround SCM tool can be successfully used for source code management in a number of different development environments and for various tools. Examples of commonly used and popular tools that it can work with include Visual Studio, WebSphere, JBuilder, Eclipse, CodeWarrior and IntelliJIDEA.

A bonus in adopting Seapine CM as your company’s preferred change management solution is that it can also be extended in a number of different ways. These different possibilities include triggers, email notifications, a SOAP based SDK, XML data exchange, and an ODBC client.

Seapine’s philosophy is to, “Work smarter not harder with Seapine CM”. If your
company or organisation is currently facing
up hill battles with change management then this may need to become your business
philosophy too.

PRICE and LICENSING ARRANGEMENTS:

The use of the Seapine CM software within your company or organisation is governed via a system of license types, namely named licenses, floating licenses or a combination of these licenses. For full details about the licensing arrangements, including advice about how to maximise the number of Seapine CM users at a minimum cost, visit www.seapine.com/cmslicensing.html

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

The minimum system requirements for
installing and running Seapine CM on a Windows platform are 400 MHz Pentium PC; 60 MB hard disk space; 256 MB RAM (512 MB is  recommended); and one of the following versions of Windows: 2000, XP, 2003, or
Vista. Note that Seapine CM can also be run on the following platforms: Mac OS X; Linux; and Solaris. The minimum system requirements for each of these platforms can be found at
www.seapine.com/cmslicensing.html

EVALUATION VERSION:

A free 30 day evaluation version of Seapine CM is available, and during that time, free technical support is also offered.

PROS:

• Can be executed on a  number of platforms: Windows; Mac OS X; Linux; and Solaris.

• Has the potential to dramatically simplify the manner in which change management is conducted throughout your company.

• Offers a scalable solution to change management, with the Seapine CM software being suitable across the entire range of businesses, from smaller ones through to the largest of organisations.

• Works in conjunction with popular developer tools like Visual Studio.

• Flexibility in that it is possible for IT staff to work remotely with it.

• With tightly controlled change management, the potential exists to deliver higher quality software within shorter development time frames.

www.seapine.com/cmsuite.html

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