RTC 3.0 Is Here!!

The past couple of months have been quite busy for the Jazz Jumpstart team, but we have managed to get through them with our sanity pretty much intact.  We are excited about the latest RTC release, which just went GA (general availablity) today.  You can read Rolf Nelson’s overview of the highlights of RTC 3.0 to get you started and to learn what capabilities you have with RTC 3.0.

Our team has worked quite a bit with the newest version of RTC, and we are sharing what we have learned with the rest of the Jazz community.  Look for our articles out on Jazz.net.  We have new versions of the popular RTC Deployment Guide and RTC Administration Guide. Here is a list of some of the other material that the Jumpstart team has created:

• Jazz Licensing in RTC 3.x – a nice article on what has changed in RTC licensing, or what the impacts of these changes are.
• Tips for Upgrading RTC 2.x to RTC 3.0 – this article is a must read for you if you plan on upgrading from RTC 2.x to RTC 3.0.
• WAS, DB2, LDAP Configuration –  a nice example of how to deploy RTC in a WAS environment, with an LDAP configuration.
• Import CC/CQ/UCM to RTC – a walk through the steps to take when attempting to import data
• Continuous Integration with Visual Studio and Rational Team Concert – a very good article that has been updated for RTC 3.0
• Where are my reports? – explanation of why you have no predefined reports on your Jazz project (hint: it’s easy to fix!)
• Considerations for RTC 3.x backups – a good guide on how you should be providing disaster recovery and backup of you RTC 3.0 implementation
• Work Item Access Restrictions – a lot of people want to limit visibility of some work items based on user, and this shows you how to do it

I hope that some (or all) of this is helpful to you.  At the very least this should get you started on finding out everything that you want to know about the new RTC 3.0 delivery.

Integrating Jazz with Perforce

This will be a quick blog posting just to let the people who follow this blog know about a new piece of content available on IBM developerWorks.  It is an article and some code from Ken Kumagai, which demonstrates an integration between RTC and Perforce.  It is called Integrate Perforce software with Rational Team Concert, and it is an article that explains how to integrate RTC with the Perforce tooling, so you can use Perforce for code management, and RTC for work items and planning.

Even if you are just thinking about integrating some other SCM tool with RTC, this is worth a quick read.  He explains how his code works, and how he utilizes the REST API to enable this integration.  He also has some good links to other materials like Integrating other SCM systems with Rational Team Concert 2.0.  I know that some customers have asked about the potential for doing this, so I figured that i would share this with you.

One other point about this is also interesting.  While most Jazz based examples of extensions and interfaces are done in Java, or Javascript, Ken’s work is all done in Perl.  One of the nice things about the Jazz REST API is the flexibility that people have to use the language that they like to interface with it.