There are many productivity benefits due to this capability. First, it allows designers to work on the project even after the main line of design is in integration phase. Second, it allows designers to experiment with the main line of design without de-stabilizing the design. Third, it allows designers to fix bugs in previous releases without affecting other designers. Finally, it allows development during the system integration phase.
Designers can make changes on the branch and merge the changes later.
SOS supports design file sharing with help of concurrent check-out. SOS makes it easy for 2 designers to work on the same file. In a typical design project, designers continuously make changes to the design repository by creating new revisions, tagging and re-tagging revisions, creating new branches and taking snapshots. It is very difficult for designers to keep track of all the latest changes and to continuously update their work-area with the relevant one. In SOS designers can on demand choose to update their work-area with latest changes.