1. Easier to use, especially for those who know SourceSafe already.
2. Enhanced security. Password Policy provided and more convenient to manage permissions.
3. Much better integration with Microsoft products. Dynamsoft is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. SourceAnywhere passed Optimized for Microsoft Visual Studio, Certified for Windows Vista, and Certified for Windows Server.
4. Better product integration. SourceAnywhere comes with GUI client, command client, SDK, Eclipse plug-in, Visual Studio integration, Dreamweaver/flash integration, cross-platform client. All are in one product.
5. Web development through FTP and multiple sites are supported. SourceAnywhere can automatically detect which files are changed, and only transfer the changed/added files.
6. Distributed development. If you need to access your version control server from a remote location, the SourceAnywhere cache server can greatly improve your developers' productivity.
7. Better support. Dynamsoft is proud of our service.
I assume most of those points are made versus to sourcesafe, and not, say svn, since with svn is integrated in pretty much everything, and just like with cvs there's plugins for many IDE's available, and distributed development is very well supported of course.
The support point may be a key reason for some businesses to use your product.
1. Easier to use, especially for those who know SourceSafe already.
Does that mean the use and design is similar to vss? If so, it may indeed be a great alternative for people feeling 'locked in' with vss, but are frustrated about it's quirks and brokenness.
But I feel you didn't really answer my question though:
How well is it's branching support etc?
The example provided in the
linkRenegade provided shows a pretty good scenario:
A revision control system should provide powerful branching support. With strong branching support, developers can easily make minor revisions of old versions while work toward the next major release continues. Highly experimental code can be checked into a branch, keeping it separate from mainstream development but backing it up and making it available to other developers. If the project is "frozen" while a milestone or final release is built, a developer can continue development toward the next version on a branch. (Or more commonly, a new branch can be created for the freeze while general development continues on the main branch. When the release is done, changes on the frozen branch can be merged back into the main branch.) SourceSafe's branching support fails to effectively support any of this.
With powerful branching, a revision control system must also provide strong merging support to reconcile different branches. At the least, the system must allow a developer to examine the differences between two branches, modify them to create a merged version, and when satisfied check them in. SourceSafe's merge support is tightly integrated with checking in, making it difficult to examine differences and test the proposed merge before checking it into the tree. With this weak level of support, it's easy to check non-functioning code into the revision control system.
How would this situation be handled in SourceAnywhere?