Source Control - Rational clear case Vs Microsoft Team foundation server

Question

I have been using Microsoft Team Foundation server 2008 version as source control for my code files. However, there are other people in our company who are using Rational ClearCase for their source control. So basically I was thinking about difference between these two for -

1. Are there any outstanding features in Rational Clear case which are not available in TFS and vice versa.
2. How do you compare these two source controls in terms of usability, cost, reliability and any other comparison parameters.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

• MVFS certainly comes to mind (the ability to access source code without having to download it on the local hard drive)
• UCM is another feature you can choose to use (Unified change Management, comes with ClearCase and adds on top of it UCM metadata about configuration and merges)

See ClearCase advantages/disavantages and How to Leverage Clearcase's features for more on UCM.
See Version control with MVFS for more on MVFS.

ClearCase has branches as first-class citizen, which TFS has only in its 2010 edition.
(see "TFS2010 Branching into a subfolder of another branch" and "Team Foundation Server and branching characteristics, compared to others" for more on that "branch" notion)

In term of cost, it is hard to compare because of the level of TFS with Microsoft products (Visual Studio in particular):

• for a Microsoft-oriented development environment, TFS is much more adapted than ClearCase.
• for a general development environment with lots of development and complex merge workflow, ClearCase (and with it UCM) is interesting.