Last week I was out doing some work with customers and training a group of people on the CLM 2011 solution in general, and on the upgrade process for moving from RTC 2.x/RQM 2.x/RRC 2.x to CLM 2011. I love doing these types of sessions because I often end up learning how people react to the various materials that my Jumpstart team creates (in this case it was the CLM 2011 Upgrade Workshop). i also end up learning new things that I never knew about. That was the case again, and I thought that it might help some of you if I shared what I have learned.
During the class I made the point that the CLM solution is wonderful, and the integrations are powerful, but only if our customers are able to leverage these integrations to help improve the speed or quality of their software. One way customers realize the benefits of this is through the real-time colaboartion enabled by being able to seamlessly jump from doing one thing, say code development, to another, maybe checking the requirements that you are developing code for. the other way that customers realize this benefit is through improved cross-capability reporting. Being able to report and correlate data from you change management, configuration management, requirements management and test management tools is a powerful thing.
So we discussed Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence (RRDI), and we discussed how this was something that any Jazz customer has the entitlement to use, and how critical it can be to the overall success of some of our Jazz customers. Then we also spent some time discussing Rational Publishing Engine (RPE) and Rational Reporting for Document Generation (RRDG). Since we don’t run into these so much, I had to admit that I didn’t know a lot about these, other then the fact that Rational Requirments Composer (RRC) uses the RRDG reporting engine to execute some of it’s reports. Needless to say, I wasn’t providing too many answers to the questions my class was throwing out there. All I could do is relate what I knew from having gone through the CLM 2011 Reporting Workshop (which is VERY good).
One of the other students in the class was able to rescue me, and provide some very good information on our reporting solutions. He pointed out to me and the rest of the class that they could enable themselves very easily with RPE, using the online resources available to everyone. He shared some links with us to some tutorials for using RPE. I glanced at them briefly, found them useful, and figured that I should share them with the rest of the world:
So if you get a chance, run through these and let me know what you think. I would be interested in hearing your feedback on how useful these tutorials are.
Dan Toczala's Blog 