CollabNet has introduced a package of professional services called "Community in a Box." The services help organizations that use CollabNet TeamForge to transform the way they develop software, leveraging the best practices of open source software communities to accelerate innovation and dramatically reduce the time and cost of software development. The Community in a Box package includes the services of a full-time or part-time community manager, strategic consulting to create and deliver a custom community plan, and a Quick Start template to deploy CollabNet TeamForge. The company is also offering free one-hour Community Audits to help customers understand the health and potential of their software development communities. The Community in a Box package and the Community Audits are appropriate for both internal software development teams and publicly accessible developer communities at the edges of companies.
The Community in a Box services follow the guidelines contained in CollabNet's Community Management Cookbook, a free online resource available to registered members of openCollabNet, the company's online community.
The Community in a Box services help corporate and government software development teams to establish and nurture the culture of collaboration that characterizes the most successful open source software communities. This culture of collaboration, along with modern distributed ALM tools like CollabNet TeamForge, enables organizations to create valuable internal team dynamics and to leverage external developer communities by facilitating reuse of code, processes, artifacts, and templates, knowledge sharing and transfer, and rapid innovation. CollabNet TeamForge and the Community in a Box services work with Agile, waterfall, and all other lean software development methodologies.
"The collaboration that we foster with our Community in a Box services is in CollabNet's DNA," said CollabNet's Mike Bellissimo. "As the founder and corporate sponsor of the Subversion open source project, our experience with the best practices of open source software communities is unmatched. And, unlike other vendors' ALM offerings that were cobbled together from point solutions, CollabNet TeamForge was architected from the ground up to enable collaboration via a fully integrated suite of developer productivity tools."
The Community in a Box services are delivered by a global team of CollabNet Professional Services Consultants that create community management plans, community goals and metrics, project categorization taxonomies, user and project on-boarding processes, ALM strategies, training plans, support structures, and outreach plans.
