Contents

• New Features in Serena Dimensions CM 14.1
• Fixed Issues
• Software Compatibility Requirements
• Installation and Upgrade Notes and Issues
• Known Issues
• Unsupported Functionality

You can watch videos of Dimensions CM features in the Serena Documentation Center: http://help.serena.com/doc_center/doc_center.html#dcmVid

All the new features described below are detailed in the Dimensions CM 14.1 documentation. A searchable PDF portfolio of all the documents can be downloaded from the Serena support web site http://support.serena.com and the Serena Documentation Center http://help.serena.com/doc_center/doc_center.html#dcmDoc

What's New in 14.1?

Serena Pulse

Changesets

Versioned Repository Schema

Creating a New Stream or Project Based on a Previous Version

Lock-Free Delivery

Enhanced Merging across Streams

Annotations View

Personal Library Cache and Delta Transfers

Auto Update

New File Merge Tool

Enhanced Upload Rules

Tomcat and Java Runtime Environment

New dmcli Commands

Changes to dmcli Commands

Installing the Eclipse Integration from a Server

Dimensions CM Java API

Serena Pulse

Serena Pulse is a new tool for developers that provides you with an intuitive visualization of changes in your streams and projects.

Reviews

Reviews enables your development team to collaborate using a configurable workflow. Delivery filters control which changesets automatically create reviews. You can use reviews to:

• Ensure that only the highest quality changes make it into your builds.
• Promote team work and development best practices.
• Provide visibility into key information about the health of your changes, such as build and unit test results.
• Add comments to reviews and collaborate with team members.
• Vote to approve or reject reviews.

The review list displays all the reviews that match the selected filter.

Review Page

A review page displays information about a specific change, including:

• The review owner, the changeset (stream version) that created the review, the parent stream or project, and any related Dimensions CM requests.
• A summary of changes to the review such as: the health of builds, comments that have been added, changes to the review's state, and votes to approve or reject.
• The review owner and the lead and optional reviewers.
• The associated changesets. Multiple changesets are associated with a review if a user makes several deliveries to a stream or project using the same request.
• A list of all the item revisions associated with the selected changesets.
• The contents of all the item revisions.

You can also:

• Add comments to an item revision and collaborate with your team members.
• Vote to approve or reject a review.

Viewing Changesets

There are multiple ways that you can view the information in changesets:

• Changeset Graph: visualizes your changesets and streams of development.
• History view: displays the history of changes in chronological order.
• Contributors view: displays all the developers who have made deliveries to the repository.
• Punch Card view: displays the busiest periods for deliveries to the repository by day of the week and time.

The Changeset Graph

The changeset graph visualizes streams and their change history across multiple releases. This provides development teams and release managers with a visual understanding of what changes are being worked on, where, and why. Tight coupling between changesets and continuous integration tools, such as Jenkins, provides feedback on the health of changes and real time indication of release readiness based on build and test status.

You can use a changeset graph to:

• Visualize all your streams and projects in one place including branches and merges. Each circle or group represents a changeset or a group of changesets.
• Review the health and readiness of your changesets and decide if they ready to be merged or released.
• Watch in real time as streams are branched, merged, and moved through the build and unit test lifecycle.

Changesets

A changeset is a logical grouping of changes that is created automatically every time that you deliver changes to a stream or project in a repository. Each changeset creates a new version of a stream or project. Changesets give insight into the development activity in your streams and enable you to easily identify changes. They also reduce the complexity of parallel development by making it easier to manage sets of changes. Changesets enables you to view all of the changes that have been made to a stream or project since it was created.

The Changesets dialog box (or view) is available in all clients and integrations. Depending on the client or integration you can:

• Browse and open requests associated with a changeset.
• Merge from a stream version.
• Create a new stream or project from a stream or project version.
• Compare changeset items.
• Display the history of changeset items.
• Display the pedigree of changeset items.
• Browse and open changeset items.
• Open peer reviews and build results in Serena Pulse.

Versioned Repository Schema

To enables new features, such as changesets and enhanced merging, Dimensions CM 14.1 uses a Versioned Repository Schema (VRS). After upgrading to Dimensions CM 14.1 from an earlier version you must upgrade the data in your RDBMS to use VRS. The upgrade is required to populate the VRS for the existing streams, projects, and baselines.

To populate the VRS for a stream or project the upgrade replays the history of changes to that stream starting from its creation, against the VRS, one changeset at a time. This re-creates the version history of a stream in the new schema.

For details about upgrading your data see the installation guide for your platform.

Creating a New Stream or Project Based on a Previous Version

When creating a new stream or project you can base it on a previous version of an existing stream (or project). The new stream inherits all the item revisions from the parent stream (or project), not just the tip revisions. This new functionality is available in the desktop client, the Windows and Visual Studio integrations, and the command-line client (dmcli).

Lock-Free Delivery

Lock-free delivery enables multiple developers to deliver different changes to the same folder concurrently.

Enhanced Merging across Streams

Prior to Dimensions CM 14.1 you could only merge streams when performing an update operation. In 14.1 the update and merge operations have been separated and there is a new Merge wizard in all the clients and integrations, and a new MERGE command. Merging streams and changes is now quicker and it is easier to accurately identify the source of changes, especially when refactoring has occurred. The Update wizard has also been redesigned and is similar to the new Merge wizard.

You can merge:

• Changes across streams or their folders.
• Changes from a baseline into a target stream.
• Changes from requests owned by another stream into a target stream.

Merge is similar to Update and uses a work area to apply changes and process conflicts. This enables you to safely merge, build, and test before delivering the merge results to a target stream in a repository. When you merge two objects, for example a stream with another stream, or a stream with a baseline, Dimensions CM looks for a common ancestor. This is a point in time where the streams or work areas diverged. This is typically referred to as a three-way merge. The merging process uses changesets to find the common ancestor.

Annotations View

The Annotations view annotates the lines of code in your source files. Annotations make it easier to find when a change was introduced. You can also see who made a change and why. Each annotation displays the item revision and the name of the user who delivered the change. You can hover over an annotation to view additional information about an item revision such as:

• The date and time of the delivery.
• Its related change requests.
• Any comments added by the user.

The Annotations view is available in all the clients and integrations. You can also use the ANNOTATE command in the dmcli command-line client to list file annotations.

Personal Library Cache and Delta Transfers

Personal library cache directory (PLCD), and delta compression on file transfers, provide significant performance improvements for geographically distributed development teams. PLCD enables faster access to repository files for distributed teams by removing network transfers when the same revision has been previously fetched to a workstation. PLCD makes a local copy in a cache directory of items downloaded from, and uploaded to, Dimensions CM. This mechanism speeds up transfers when fetching the same revision more than once, for example, fetching a baseline or restoring item revisions.

Delta transfers reduce network traffic by only transferring the sections of files that have been modified between revisions. For this optimization to be applied the original revision of the file must have been fetched to, or saved from, the local workstation. The greatest reduction in transfer times is for files that have modifications in only a few sections and large continuous sections of unchanged content. Files that have widely dispersed multiple changes between revisions have a smaller improvement in transfer times.

Auto Update

Auto update is the process of managing the automatic update of Dimensions CM clients and agents. Auto update has the following benefits for administrators:

• Centralized control over Dimensions CM software updates.
• Semi-automated roll-out of client software upgrades (Windows only).
• Fully automated roll-out of agent software upgrades (except Dimensions for z/OS).
• Flexible upgrade process.
• Audit trail of updates across a network.
• Scheduling of updates.

During the silent installation of clients and agents you can add values that point to a server hosting installation packages for auto update. For details see Configuring and Using Auto Update in the Dimensions CM System Administration Guide.

New File Merge Tool

The default file merge tool in Dimensions CM on Windows is Araxis Merge, a two and three-way file comparison (diff) and merging tool. You can obtain help in Araxis Merge at any time by using the commands in the Help menu or by pressing the F1 key. Some windows also contain a Help button. You can change the default file merge tool to the Serena Merge Tool or any third party application. For details see Configuring the Default Merge Tools in the Dimensions CM System Administration Guide.

Enhanced Upload Rules

Upload rules now support multiple wildcards and Ant style pattern matches in filenames and paths. Ant patterns help to simplify the organization of separate design part rules. For example, you can define design part rules by a directory pattern match while maintaining the existing item type to file extension mapping. The patterns are similar to those used in DOS and UNIX:

• '*' matches zero or more characters.
• '**' matches zero or more directories.
• '?' matches one character.

For more details see Upload Rules in the Dimensions CM Process Configuration Guide.

Tomcat and Java Runtime Environment

Dimensions CM 14.1 installs the version 7.0 of Tomcat and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

New dmcli Commands

The following new commands have been added to dmcli, the Dimensions CM command-line client:

• ANNOTATE: Displays the contents of a file where each line is annotated with information about the person who last modified it and when.
• AUPG: Starts an upgrade process on a Dimensions CM agent system.
• CIP: Creates a baseline containing files to be used to upgrade a Dimensions CM client or agent.
• DLCA: Updates a single library cache area with a list of one or more Dimensions CM items.
• LOG: Lists the changeset history of your streams and projects.
• LUPG: Lists the upgrade history stored in a database.
• MERGE: (not available for projects). Merges changes from a stream, change request, or baseline into a work area owned by another stream using a three-way merge process based on the common ancestor stream version. The command compares the target work area with the stream or baseline and automatically applies any non-conflicting content and refactoring changes.

For details see the Dimensions CM 14.1 Command-Line Reference.

Changes to dmcli Commands

The following commands have changed:

• UPLOAD: this command is now atomic: if a failure occurs during the execution of the command, any changes that have been applied in the current operation are discarded and the command is terminated.
• UPDATE: by default, content deleted from a work area is treated as a local change that is pending for delivery. Specify /OVERWRITE to overwrite this content with item revisions from the associated stream.
• UPDATE: cannot be used to merge changes to streams, use the new MERGE command instead.
• AIWS: If you do not specify /WS_FILENAME a warning is displayed if the item paths across the source and target projects do not match. If you specify /WS_FILENAME the specified path is used as the new path of the item in the target project. Therefore the item is effectively renamed if its existing path differs from the /WS_FILENAME value.
• DOWNLOAD and UPLOAD: /SCRIPTFILE qualifier is deprecated.
• CBL: Design baselines do not include checked-out revisions.
• CS: When you use the Create Stream command to create a new stream based on a parent, all revisions of the parent stream are included even if you do not specify the /ALL qualifier. Create a tip baseline and then create a new stream based on this tip baseline if you want do not want to include older item revisions in your new stream.

Installing the Eclipse Integration from a Server

You can install, and upgrade, the Eclipse integration for Dimensions CM from an update site hosted by the Dimensions CM server. This site supports both Tomcat and Websphere. You can use the same method to install Appcelerator Titanium Studio into Eclipse. For details see the installation guide for your platform.

Dimensions CM Java API

The Java API is built with Java 6. Serena recommends that programs using the Dimensions CM Java API are rebuilt using Java 6 or later.

This section provides detailed information about issues fixed in Dimensions CM.

Fixes in Dimensions CM 14.1

For a complete list of fixes in Dimensions CM 14.1 refer to the Serena Support Knowledgebase:

http://knowledgebase.serena.com/InfoCenter/index?page=content&cat=PVDIMENSIONS_14.1_RESOLVED&channel=DEFECTS

Fixes in Previous Releases of Dimensions CM

For a complete list of fixes in previous releases of Dimensions CM refer to the Serena Support Knowledgebase:

http://knowledgebase.serena.com/InfoCenter/index?page=content&cat=PVDIMENSIONS&channel=DEFECTS

and select the required category.

Supported Platforms and Third Party Integrations

For details of supported platforms and third party integrations visit this Serena support web page and click View to see the complete Dimensions CM platform matrix:

http://support.serena.com/roadmap/Product.aspx?sel=PVDIMENSIONS

Virtual Environment Support

Serena recognizes that virtualization technology provides significant utility and value to our customers. As such, Serena conducts functional testing and certifies our products using virtualization technology in addition to native environments. While Serena expects that our products will function properly when running on supported platforms in a virtualized environment as well as a native environment, there may be functional and performance limitations. Serena will not require that customers recreate and troubleshoot every issue in a non-virtualized environment, however there may be circumstances in which such action may be required. Serena will only make this request when there is reason to believe that the virtualized environment is a contributing factor to the issue. If the issue cannot be reproduced in a supported non-virtualized environment, customers will need to refer their issues to their virtualization vendor.

NOTE Upgrading from the Dimensions CM 14.1 beta releases is not supported.

Installing this Release

For full details about installing this release see the following documents:

• Serena Dimensions CM 14.1 Installation Guide for Windows
• Serena Dimensions CM 14.1 Installation Guide for UNIX

Upgrading from Previous Versions of Dimensions CM

To upgrade from Dimensions CM 2009 R2 or 12.x to 14.1:

1. Run the Dimensions CM 14.1 installer.
2. Run the VRS upgrade utility to upgrade the data in your RDBMS.

IMPORTANT!

To prevent issues with data that was created with a previous version of Dimensions CM, do the following:

• Deliver all the changes to the repository before upgrading clients to 14.1.
• Run the Update command after the upgrade to 14.1, this will also upgrade metadata in your work areas.

Upgrading Dimensions Connect for Serena Business Manager (SBM)

You must install Dimensions Connect for SBM when you upgrade the Dimensions CM server to a new version. For example, if you upgrade the Dimensions CM server to 14.1 you must also install the 14.1 version of Dimensions Connect for SBM. If not the integration may not work as expected. See the Dimensions CM Connect for Serena Business Manager User's Guide.

Shutting Down Tomcat Before a Server Upgrade

Serena Software recommends that you shut down the Serena Common Tomcat before starting any Dimensions CM software upgrade. The upgrade installer is not able to perform this step so you must do it manually. If you do not the Web archive (.war) files used by the upgraded Dimensions CM Web tools may not expand correctly, causing files to be missing from these tools.

Stopping Dimensions on Windows

When you stop the Dimensions Service on Windows the dmschedule and dmemail processes may continue to run for a period after the other processes have exited. You should ensure that these processes have terminated before performing an upgrade or patch installation.

Closing the Microsoft Management Console

Serena Software recommends that on Windows you check that the Microsoft Management Console is closed before starting an installation or upgrade.

Delay Starting the Installer

When you start an installation there may be a delay of up to a minute before the first page of the installer appears.

Unable to Connect to Database

If during an installation an error message is displayed stating that Dimensions CM is unable to connect to the database but does not tell you why, do the following:

• Ensure that you have entered the correct database password and Oracle DSN if applicable.
• Ensure that the locally or remotely located RDBMS database used by Dimensions CM is active ("up") by establishing that it is running, or that you can connect to it, for example using standard RDBMS database utilities such as sqlplus.

Araxis Merge is not Registered

If you installed and uninstalled a trial version of Araxis Merge the Dimensions CM instance of Araxis Merge can appear as not registered. Remove the expired license in the Windows registry by deleting the "SerialNumber" value under: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Araxis. The registration information provided by Dimensions CM will be used instead.

Installing on Windows Server 2012R2 with Oracle 12

If you cannot install on Windows Server 2012R2 with Oracle 12:

• The system PATH must contain ORACLE_HOME (this should be the case if the system is restarted after installing Oracle). If ORACLE_HOME is not in the path the CM server installation will fail to validate the Oracle connection details.
• If the Oracle administrator password contains a full stop (.), comma (,), or semicolon (;) the CM server installer may fail to validate the Oracle connection details. Temporarily remove these characters from the password before installing.

Installer Displays Incorrect Messages when Upgrading from 12.1 with SSO

The installer displays incorrect messages when you upgrade from Dimensions CM 12.1 with SSO to 14.1 without SSO. You can ignore these messages as they do not have any impact on the installation and all files are installed correctly.

New Version of ALF Events Configuration File

During installation and upgrade a new version of the ALF events configuration file ($DM_ROOT/dfs/events_config.xml) is installed for Serena Pulse and your customizations are overridden. Your original file is backed up and you can merge your customizations into the new version.

Manually Stopping Processes during an Agent Installation

During an Agent installation the following processes do not stop when the Dimensions Listener Service is stopped:

• dmlsnr.exe
• dmpool.exe
• dmupgradecln.exe

To shutdown the Dimensions Agent node you must end these processes manually.

Serena Watcher SVC Exit

The Serena Watcher SVC Exit has changed and should be reinstalled. For details see the Dimensions for z/OS Installation and Administration Guide.

The following issues are known in this release. For a complete list of known issues and potential workarounds refer to the Serena Support Knowledgebase:

http://knowledgebase.serena.com/InfoCenter/index?page=content&cat=PVDIMENSIONS_14.1_REPORTED&channel=DEFECTS

Using the 12.2.2 Version of the Windows Explorer Integration

If you are using the 12.2.2 version of the Windows Explorer integration you must upgrade the stream or project associated with each work area.

Using Remote Work Areas

• Using remote work areas for update and merge is only supported with 14.1 agents.
• A client version must be the same as the agent version running on a remote node.

The following features and functionality are not supported in Dimensions CM 14.1:

• Dimensions for z/OS ISPF client
• Replicator
• ART
• DM_CONCURRENT_DELIVER_LOCK_MODE server symbol
• DM_USE_OLD_CRB server symbol
• cmlink (Collage integration)
• REGDEPLOY command for Mover deployments
• SCC plug-in with Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Older versions of Microsoft may work with the DM_SCC_ENABLE configuration variable.
• UPDATE command: /NOEXECUTE qualifier
• UPDATE and DELIVER commands: /SCRIPTFILE qualifier
• Developer dm command-line client: updating a work area from a specific stream version (the tip is always used).
• Text metadata format (.metadata): automatically converted to binary metadata format (.dm) after work area update.
• Active Client 7 with 32-bit Eclipse for CAC authentication. Use Active Client 6 or 64-bit Eclipse.