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IBM Rational Team Concert for i Now Supports Floating Licenses

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The application connects dispersed development teams to help increase individual and team productivity, notes IBM. 

Users can buy IBM Rational Team Concert for i V1.0 with floating licenses, which provide a concurrent user license mechanism that is centrally logged and reported for more streamlined auditing, IBM announced this week.

IBM Rational Team concert for i helps organizations that are faced with growing pressures to quickly deliver high-quality software that is aligned with business objectives, the company says. Some of today's common challenges might include:

  • Developing traditional business applications or modernizing existing applications using diverse, non-integrated development tools that isolate RPG/COBOL developers from Web/Java/Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) developers
  • Adhering to organizational standards or regulatory requirements (such as Sarbanes-Oxley) with poorly defined processes and documentation and limited enforcement capabilities
  • Working in teams that are geographically distributed
  • Delivering more with same or even fewer resources

IBM Rational Team Concert for i drives software innovation through collaboration, says IBM, transforming people, especially those involved in native RPG and COBOL application development and those involved in application modernization efforts, who have diverse teams to work together to develop and deliver software in an increasingly agile manner. IBM Rational Team Concert for i connects dispersed development teams to help increase individual and team productivity, compress development cycles, and deliver high-quality software fast, according to IBM.

IBM Rational Team Concert for i comes now with support for floating licenses. You can leverage the flexibility of a floating user license model to distribute or share acquired licenses. When you purchase the floating client access licenses, you must apply the latest IBM Rational Team Concert for i server program temporary fix (PTF) to enable the floating license support.

Based on the open and extensible Jazz platform, IBM Rational Team Concert for i empowers software teams to collaborate in real time in the context of specific roles and processes by delivering new levels of productivity, agility, and innovation, the company says.

IBM Rational Team Concert for i integrates source control, work item, and build management into a single application. It enables distributed teams spread throughout your enterprise to more effectively collaborate in developing and delivering quality software on time and on budget for the IBM i platform. It allows teams to simplify, automate, and govern application development on IBM i. IBM Rational Team Concert for i builds on the core IBM Rational Team Concert product by providing a Team Server and Build System Toolkit that runs on IBM i.

IBM Rational Team Concert for i client is shipped as an installable component of IBM Rational Developer for i. To use the IBM Rational Team Concert for i functionality for team collaboration and managing RPG and COBOL applications, you need to use IBM Rational Developer for i in conjunction with IBM Rational Team Concert for i.

IBM Rational Developer for i is an integrated development environment for creating new and modernizing existing RPG and COBOL applications.

IBM Rational Team Concert for i includes the following integrated components:

  • Software configuration management: IBM Rational Team Concert for i delivers essential software version control, workspace management, and parallel development support to individuals and teams. Specific functions include:
  • Developer-to-team flow
  • Integrated stream management
  • Component-level baselines
  • Server-based sandboxes
  • Components identified in streams and available baselines
  • The capability to store, control and track changes to RPG, COBOL, and Java application source in a repository
  • Support for IBM i native library file system and the integrated file system (IFS)
  • Work item management: IBM Rational Team Concert for i supports different types of work item for software development teams. Team members can discuss about a particular work item; discussions are captured for later reference. Work item owners or interested parties can subscribe and receive notifications via RSS/Atom feeds. Team members can share queries with the team or with particular users. Functions include:
  • Defects, enhancements, and tasks
  • Query results view and share queries with team or member
  • Support for approvals and discussions
  • Tracking of changes to RPG, COBOL, and Java source through work items
  • Query editor interface

Build management: IBM Rational Team Concert for i enables efficient scheduling and execution of software build processes. You can leverage multiple servers for rapid, cross-platform build processing and create a detailed bill of materials to enhance build reproducibility. Additional functions include:

  • Work item and change set traceability
  • Local or remote build servers running on IBM i
  • Build for RPG and COBOL applications on IBM i
  • Support for Ant and command line tools for Java
  • Build definitions for team builds

IBM Rational Team Concert for i helps you gain the cross-organizational visibility and collaboration you need to succeed.

  • Process automation and guidance: Enforcement of agreed-upon standards can help ensure higher-quality results. Because not all organizations are the same, rules are configurable and can be defined or refined as needed, enabling continuous improvement.
  • In-context collaboration: Through personal customizable views, team members can gain better understanding of what is happening on projects (news and events, build status, what is being worked on, and changes). Team members can also be made aware of what their teammates are working on and who is online and possibly available to collaborate with.
  • Web client: Leveraging AJAX technology, users experience a rich client style of interaction for Web access. External stakeholders or occasional users can gain access to data without a rich client.
  • Dashboards and reporting: Project, individual, and team dashboards offer reliable project health information drawn directly from ongoing work, replacing tedious and time-consuming reporting overhead.

IBM Rational Team Concert includes a complete set of integrated functionality to enable teams to effectively deliver software on time and on budget:

  • Integrated iteration planning and execution
  • Real-time project status window
  • Single structure for project-related artifacts
  • World-class team onboarding and offboarding, including team membership, sub teams, and project inheritance
  • Role-based operational control for flexible definition of process and capabilities
  • Team advisor for defining and refining rules and enabling continuous improvement
  • Process enactment and enforcement
  • In-context collaboration showing team members and work status
  • Customizable project dashboard
  • Real-time reporting and queries

In addition to the core capabilities available in IBM Rational Team Concert, IBM Rational Team Concert for i offers the following specific IBM i features:

  • IBM Rational Team Concert for i that extends the capabilities of IBM Rational Team Concert.
  • An integrated set of collaborative software delivery tools for IBM i development including source control, change management, build and process management-IBM Rational Team Concert for i provides the capability to store, control and track changes to RPG and COBOL application source in a repository, open work items and associate changes to source with those work items and build your applications from the repository. IBM Rational Team Concert for i can be configured to reflect a team's process, including defining project iterations (milestones) and planning of each iteration, permissions, user roles, and assignment of each member of a team to a particular user role.
  • Integration with IBM Rational Developer for i to enable team capabilities for native IBM i applications-IBM Rational Team Concert for i integrates with the i Projects component of IBM Rational Developer for i to provide an integrated user experience. Use the Eclipse-based environment to open or accept a work item (a task or a defect); check out a RPG, COBOL, DDS, or CL member; make changes to the member using the built-in LPEX Editor that provides support for syntax checking and color highlighting; verify or compile changes; debug the application, before finally checking in those changes to the repository and associating them to a work item. You can do all of the above seamlessly from a single client which includes both IBM Rational Team Concert for i and IBM Rational Developer for i.
  • Specialized support for traditional language artifacts such as RPG and COBOL-IBM Rational Team Concert for i provides specialized support for source control and build of RPG and COBOL applications including a feature to automatically copy changes from the repository to the IBM i file system so changes show up in team members' library lists, a view that shows comparisons between a repository and the IBM i library file system, and support for building traditional applications.
  • IBM i artifact builds-IBM Rational Team Concert for i can be used to set up a build engine on any IBM i system that can extract source from the repository and run system commands (including compile commands or any customized build commands) to do integration compile/build. You can schedule a build to run at certain time intervals or a given time of day, or you can request a build On Demand. The build can extract everything in the repository or just the changes made since the last build, and can run a particular command for every change. The commands allow substitution variables to be specified like Programming Development Manager (PDM).
  • Support for multi-tier software development and application modernization efforts-You can use IBM Rational Team Concert for i for team collaboration of projects involving not only traditional applications using RPG and COBOL, but also involving Java. IBM Rational Team Concert for i can be used to manage such multi-tier and application modernization efforts in a consistent way. The workflow and actions to check out, edit, compile and check in changes, and associate those changes with tasks or defects, is very similar, whether the source is RPG, COBOL, DDS, CL, EGL, or Java.
  • Native hosting on IBM i-IBM Rational Team Concert for i server (repository) runs on WebSphere Application Server and WebSphere Application Server Express on IBM i. It uses as its repository a library on the IBM i, which can be specified. You can use your existing system backup mechanisms to backup your IBM Rational Team Concert for i repository.

IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity, and service.

For more information, visit: www.ibm.com.

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