Plastic SCM Enterprise is a multiplatform (Windows, Linux, Unix and MAC) version control system that provides full integration with the most widely used IDEs as well and task tracking tools, and contains accurate importers for SourceSafe, CVS and Subversion; providing quick transition from these environments. Plastic SCM Professional can be configured to work with Firebird, MySQL or SQL Server database backends. Plastic SCM Professional Edition provides enterprise features such as configurable workspaces through selectors, integration with Active Directory or LDAP to enforce security policies on repositories, support for an unlimited number of users and distributed system. One Year of full support with access to all new releases within a year is included with the Professional Edition.

Fully distributed
Using Plastic a developer can have a clone of the repository on his local machine and checkin, branch and merge without connection to the main server. This is what fully distributed is about.

The benefit is clear in terms of speed, enabling developers to work from home without suffering slow VPNs or being hit by a network issue. Developers can pull and push changes to any other Plastic server (depending on the permissions) anytime. In extreme distributed environments, developers wouldn’t even use a central server. However, in practice, a central place will be used as rendezvous point.

Graphical User Interface and Visualizations
Plastic is much more than a scalable core and a great merge engine. Everything we do has the end user in mind, and making things simple and visual is key for us.

Plastic allows you to perform every version control operations from the GUI, which is pretty easy to learn. User experience is our most important goal.

It is the core feature of the GUI. It is an interactive graphic that renders the evolution of the repository. From the Branch Explorer you can branch, merge, diff, push and pull and switch to different branches. If there is a single feature that makes Plastic worth, this is the Branch Explorer.

Plastic ships with an integrated code review system. You can create reviews from changesets and branches, add comments to lines and assign the review to a developer to check it. Reviews are replicated between repos with their branches. Find more in the GUI guide

Plastic includes a built-in diff tool, Xdiff, which can be invoked as a separate tool but it is also used inside the GUI to show side by side differences. It has the ability to track moved text (even when it has been modified). You can find this in Plastic, inside the pending changes view, diffing changesets or branches or running code reviews.

Plastic comes with its own 3-way merge tool called Xmerge. Besides being a regular merge tool, it has the ability to track and merge moved code fragments. Plastic also lets you plug any other 3-way merge tool like Araxis, BeyondCompare, our own SemanticMerge and many others.

Each time you need to diff branches, changesets or labels you’ll use the Diff Window. It is a very complete interface that will show changed, added, deleted, moved and also files that have been merged in the changesets, labels or branches you’re diffing.

Plastic includes a image diff tool, able to compare two revisions of the same graphical file. The file can be in a variety of file formats (specially if you have ImageMagick installed). This tool can show images side by side, do an “onion skin” preview, calculate differences, do a “swipe” and also diff the image properties in text format.

When you browse the files in your workspace you can preview the image files and read the extended properties stored on it. Plastic can be configured to use ImageMagick to generate the previews of hundreds of different formats. You can even write your own custom previewer to support custom file formats (quite common in game development). It will also be used to diff image files.