Version control and collaboration software firm Perforce Software has announced a free cloud-based document collaboration offering called Commons Cloud.
The product is said to combine the simplicity of modern social applications with the version management capabilities of advanced software development tools.
In minutes, anyone can create a hosted team of up to 20 participants to iterate on and evolve any type of file, Perforce said. There’s no limit to the number of teams you can join.
"Documents evolve so quickly that most teams are hard pressed to keep pace," said Christopher Seiwald, founder and CEO of Perforce. "Knowledge workers lose time everyday searching for the right file, manually resolving conflicting versions and trying to piece together the contributions from colleagues. We created Commons Cloud to extend the power of enterprise version management to teams that are working on things like PowerPoint files, artwork and Microsoft Word documents. It’s a flexible and easy-to-use way for all types of knowledge workers to collaborate, but it makes no compromises to enterprise needs for compliance."
Commons Cloud eliminates the manual effort of searching for the right file, resolving conflicts among file versions and merging edits to a document. The service was designed for the 83% of knowledge workers that a recent survey by Harris Interactive found were still losing time to file versioning issues, despite using a document management system or file sharing service, Perforce said.
"One of the best things about Commons is that it provides all users with a complete and permanent history of every file, which makes everyone worry less about losing their work," said user Scott Gilliland, technical specialist at Altair Engineering. "Another feature we enjoy is the ‘File Valet.’ It makes collaboration easy by letting teams across business functions work on the same files in parallel as it automatically merges all the changes."
Commons Cloud is now available for free at commons.perforce.net.
