A project is a way to group related items (such as files and change requests) hierarchically. Views and folders enable you to organize these related items more efficiently. For example, if you create a project for a software product, the files containing the product’s functional specification, marketing requirements document, source code, and test suites can each be stored in separate folders.
Views can be used in a variety of ways. For example, different views can be used so that developers see only the project’s source code folder and its child folders, marketing personnel see only the project’s marketing folder and its child folders, and so on. In this case, each view has a different folder as its root. Views also support branching and parallel development
At the view level or item by item, you can branch data such as files and change requests. The branching enables you to create a special variation of your product. For example, you can start on the 2.0 version of your product without hampering the creation of service packs for the 1.0 version
You can create a project on any StarTeam Server configuration, if your computer has access to that server and you have been granted the rights needed to create projects in that location. When you create a project, you must provide a project name and designate a working folder location for the project's root (initial) folder. The initial view of the project is created at the same time you create the project. It has the same name as the project, although you can change the name later if you choose. The root folder is also created at this time. If your computer is not currently set up to access the server on which the project will reside, you can add access to that server as part of creating the project.