Posted by andy@assembla.com Sun, 30 Apr 2006 10:21:00 GMT

Over the past few months, we have done a lot of work on Assembla.com, our online service for building and running distributed software teams, and Breakout, the underlying platform for professional networks. Now, we are ready to share. If you have suggestions for user groups that can benefit from this resource, or bloggers that might be interested in it, let me know at andy@assembla.com Read on for the story->

Assembla – for dynamic, distributed software teams

Assembla.com provides workspaces and services for distributed software teams. Techcrunch readers can think of it as a sort of construction kit for Web 2.0 development teams. These teams are usually distributed, and often composed on the fly for a particular project. We call this approach inspired by open source.

I have been working on this approach for years, doing rapid development with great developers and low fixed cost. Now, we are bottling the magic and making it available on a larger scale.

If you are managing software projects, you can create a project workspace on Assembla.com to manage your code, documentation, and team permissions. This creates a secure IP asset that you build a team around as needed, with no fixed costs and unlimited team scalability. You can also advertise opportunities publicly or selectively. If you work on these projects, you can create a personal space, post a profile, join teams, and engage in public and private discussion with potential employers.

The online service is a work-in-progress with many rough edges, but it is feature rich in comparison with other collaboration services. Each workspace offers a wiki, discussion, issue management, feed aggregation, email alerts to the team, team invitation and permissioning, file store, Typo blog. Those are generic features for any professional network. For software teams, we have integrated Trac and Subversion, with instant activation and single-sign-on permissions. There is currently no restriction on the number of spaces, files or pages allocated to a particular user.

The service is free. We make our living supplying premium applications, and full-service distributed team recruiting, management, and development.

A Platform for Professional Networks

We describe the underlying Breakout platform as Social Software to Get Things Done. Our approach is loosely like cramming MySpaces together with real enterprise software. Over the past few years we have learned that certain kinds of software – social software for exhibiting profiles and starting discussions – is very easy to adopt. We get people engaged with easy-to adopt profiling and collaboration features, and then we let them progressively crank down on permissions and ramp up application capabilities to make real working teams.

We describe the result as a “professional network” – a population of people who work together in a variety of permission groups, ranging from global (eg an open source project), to enterprise, to small project teams. We provide mechanisms to engage these professionals, help them organize themselves into groups and projects, and support them with on-demand applications, which can be added to the workspace with integrated permissions in the same way that Trac and Subversion are integrated with assembla.com.

Our first customer for this platform is working on a network to manage the response to biological threats such as an avian flu epidemic. So, we believe social software can help get very important things done.

The software is available for enhancement and customization under an open source license.

Team

Assembla’s experienced management team came together in order to bring “inspired by open source” practices to enterprise software. Andy Singleton was the founder and CEO of Cambridge Interactive and PowerSteering Software, now the leading application for corporate six sigma deployments. Sesha Pratap was a founder of Centerline Software, which he grew to $20M as CE. Jon Stillman has 15 years of experience leading technology projects at GE, topped of with a stint doing strategy for Divine Interventures and a venture partner position at High Peaks Ventures.