My first impression was that this is a good product by a small company, and maybe even has my perfect feature set(I'm not very demanding in VCS systems, sourcesafe has always worked for me). I grabbed the demo files and started looking, shooting & hacking to see how the system works & perfoms.
Installation.
Good installation. I did not understand all of it that went by, but it went very smooth. In no time my workstation's IIS was hosting dragnet/vault, while the database was on my devserver over at EHQ. Nice.
User Setup & Security
If you have seen one enterprise system, you've seen em all. This included Vault and Dragnet. The only thing I had to look up was intergrating user accounts with both tools. The rest seems straightforward, although from reading the forum switching security context(from e.g. AD to sql-server) seem to have some caveats. I opted for Vault security and had no issues.
(M)Architecture.
Solid. What I hear MS has the same opinion
I'm surprised it worked so well. Even with non dedicated machines. Having a SQL database as backend is a very good move. Some design descisions however bring it down a little bit(I will come back on this one)
Client.
The Client is solid, and does all the work that VSS did and more. A gripe of me is wanting to use labels/comments for filtering/searching/sorting. This seems to be possible with this client, although not in the main search screen but the label list screen. This screen is a good attempt, but suffers from some small issues, like not being able to sort columns, or do some kind of filtering. Comment searching/filtering in de client seems to be an omission. Both comment and label cannot be added as a column to any listview.
WebClient.
I'm not sure what the webclient does beyond providing copies of its files, but it is handy to have when no client is available. No real comments
Dragnet integration.
Convenient, but maybe too simple. You cannot set anything in the Dragnet item yourself. For example setting the status to 'Needs Testing' after a checkin. Anybody using a tool like Dragnet needs some form of QA/Change managmement. Other forum posts also indicate Dragnet needs some improvement.
BTW I think the real future of Dragnet is not as a new QA tool(of which there are far too many already), but when an API is available, as an interface between a QA tool and vault.
I'll leave it at this for the moment. I'll come back when I've got some more.