There is value in communicating status of work via a central SCM repository. For binary files and locking this is particularly so. The approach of Perforce whe

There is value in communicating status of work via a central SCM repository. For binary files and locking this is particularly so. The approach of Perforce where file status is tracked on the server provides this. There can be costs associated so it's not just a panacea for all SCM ills, but it's certainly worth considering. One reason Perforce is so widely used in game development - it scales easily to Terabyte sized repositories straight forwardly.