[Solved] long term support for Collaborate in Unity 5.6? (and moving from P4 to Collaborate)

I have a team currently using Unity 5.6 with Perforce. Administering P4 takes more time than I'd like and now that Collaborate is maturing, it seems like an option worth considering.

My project has been in development for a few years. Converting it to new versions of Unity has occasionally been an extreme time sink, with 4.6 and 5.0 being significant pain points. So, we have strong intention to finish this project with 5.6, even with Team Unity moving its attention to Unity 2017. Official support for 5.6 is winding down, and will likely prioritize bug fixes over features.

I know that Collaborate is available in 5.6 and I saw the update announcement in April pertaining to that version.

What can we expect in terms of long term Collaborate support for 5.6? What kinds of improvements will carry over to this group and what will be exclusive for 2017 customers?

I'm trying to soak up all of the threads in this subforum right now. Anybody hit any Collaborate limitations in 5.6 that wouldn't exist in Unity 2017? Or SCM features they really missed from P4? (We don't use esoteric P4 features often and can probably suffer a very rare manual fork.) Anybody tried concurrent P4 and Collaborate, if only for a trial period? Pointers to existing threads are appreciated too.

Thanks!

 

(slightly off topic, but if you have the project up and running on 5.6, the jump to 2017 shouldn't be *that* painful. Obviously I don't know your project, but in general the jump from 5.6 to 2017 has been kinda painless for us. At the very least it was nothing compared to going from 4.x to 5.0)

 

Thanks for the input Nick! I've heard that from a couple of others.

 

Anybody have a pointer to a status or roadmap for Collaborate in 5.6? I can't seem to find one.

I gather that it's currently in beta given this comment here. It seems though, like they intend for it to be a fully supported feature in 5.6, despite winding down that version and servicing their 2017 branch first.

@ryanc-unity Any chance of a developer comment on what to expect in this area?

Thanks.

 

Hi @s_guy! Collaborate has exited BETA for 2017.1. However Collaborate in 5.6 and earlier will always be a BETA product. We do not currently have any plans to further support Collab for 5.6 in order for us to focus all of our efforts on bug fixes for future versions of Unity. I apologize for any confusion. I know that upgrading to the latest version of Unity can be a painful process at times but like @AcidArrow mentioned before the transition for projects from 5.6 to 2017.1 isn't as painful for most users as it's been for earlier versions.

However, we have been and will continue to back port high user pain bug fixes up to 2017.1, so if you are able to update to that version then you can be confident that it will continue to receive support from us for a long while.

 

@ryanc-unity Thanks for the clarification.