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Agile company adds communication tools to collaboration platform


By Robert Mullins
July 22, 2008 — 
VersionOne, a maker of project management tools that use agile methodology, has reworked the collaboration capabilities of its Agile Team and Agile Enterprise platforms.

As do other makers of agile development platforms, VersionOne offers a central server-based location at which different people working on a project—developers, testers, IT managers and business stakeholders—can meet during the course of a project. Team members can inform others when they have completed a particular task, as well as ask each other questions, share ideas and provide progress reports.

Agile Team 8.2, a free version of the platform for startups, adds communications threads that allow people to follow the course of conversations among team members on a specific problem. It also includes the ability to turn data into PDF documents for easier distribution, said Robert Holler, president and CEO of VersionOne.

The commercial version of Agile Enterprise 8.2 also adds a notification system by which one team member can send a message to another with a question, idea or comment about a particular issue. It also can now send updates by e-mail or RSS feeds, notifying all team members of particular news.

“The demand from customers is, ‘Thanks for managing the projects, but can you facilitate communications a bit, or automate or enable easier communication on the things I am working on [and do so] within the project management tool?’ ” Holler said.

Agile Enterprise 8.2 can be purchased on either a subscription or a installed basis. The subscription is US$30 per user per month, while the installed license costs $599 plus $100 annually for upgrades and other support, he added. In the latter case, the software is installed on a company’s Web server and team members can access the server from wherever in the world they are working.

Agile Enterprise and Agile Team work with the major different forms of agile development, Holler explained, including Dynamic Systems Development Method, Extreme Programming and Scrum. Agile, in contrast to the traditional “waterfall” method of software development, breaks down the project into smaller steps, or iterations.

Companies offering tools similar to VersionOne’s agile project management and collaboration platform include Rally Software and Danube Technologies, which introduced a ScrumWorks 3.1 upgrade in June.

Larger companies are going after the agile market, too. IBM Rational began releasing at the end of June the first commercial products of its Jazz Team Concert effort, which features blogs, instant messaging and other social networking tools to keep team members informed.


Related Search Term(s): agile development, VersionOne


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