Friday, October 01, 2004

Vault 3.0

Ever since we shipped Vault 2.0 in February, we have been working on the next release.  Originally, we planned to call this release version 2.1, but this week we changed our mind.  The upcoming release will be called Vault 3.0.

We had some interesting internal discussions here about this decision.  All of us here are sensitive to concerns about "version number inflation".  However, this release was originally intended to be a short cycle with just a few small incremental improvements over 2.0.  Suddenly, eight months have passed, and we've been sneaking-in a lot of cool stuff:

• Bunches-o-bug-fixes
• Integration with our new bug-tracking product, Dragnet
• Email notifications
• New dialog for adding files, much easier
• New dialog for setting working folders
• Much improved handling of files in status "unknown"
• Greatly simplified license tracking
• Integration with Active Directory
• Several improvements to make Merge Branches even easier to use
• Improvements to the DiffMerge tool, including Unicode support
• Significant improvements to performance and scalability, especially for larger teams

Note that this is merely a change in version number.  It does not affect our release schedule.  We currently plan to ship Vault 3.0 about 4-6 weeks from now.

Note also that this change also does not affect pricing.  All previous releases of Vault have been free upgrades, including version 1.1, version 1.2, and even version 2.0.  We had already planned for this release to be the first Vault upgrade which actually costs money.  We haven't announced the details of the upgrade pricing yet, but we soon will, and the new version number has made no difference in our plans.

We are quite excited about this release of Vault.  It will be faster, more polished, and easier to use than ever before.  It deserves to be called 3.0.