It is often useful to integrate your definitive software library with existing processes.  Examples of these processes include a build process that must retrieve approved open source or third party components from the definitive software library(DSL).  A build process that publishes final gold releases to the build system.   Deployment processes that must retrieve approved release implementations out of the DSL.    In this 30 minute – 4 part tutorial, I explain how you can install ANT and the Rational Asset Manager Scripting client files to be able to run scripts to download an asset, publish or modify an asset including defining dependency relationships on an asset.   The tutorial is a primer to get you started.   The Rational Asset Manager documentation provides a comprehensive reference to all the available capabilities.  I have also included the sample scripts here.

ScriptingWithRationalAssetManagerv7.2

Sample Scripts used in this tutorial

This demonstration provides an overview of how to use IBM® Rational® Asset Manager as your definitive software library to build and publish assets. See how Rational Asset Manager, Rational Build Forge and Rational AppScan can automate the delivery and governance of reliable software builds.

Demonstration by Dr Gili Mendel.

Rational Asset Manager v7.2 is Available.   Learn what is new in this 6 part Webcast series.   In Part 1 of Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 What’s New, see how you can search for assets in the Web client.

Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 What’s New Part 1 Search

In Part 2 of Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz  What’s New,  see how you can create assets in the Web client.
Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz What’s New Part 2 Create & Review Assets

In Part 3 of Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz  What’s New,  see how you can define the asset governance process for each role, community and asset type in the Web client.

Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz What’s New Part 3 Define Governance Process

In Part 4 of Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz  What’s New,  see how you can Use and Report on Assets in the Web client.

Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz What’s New Part 4 Use and Report on Assets

In Part 5 of Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz  What’s New,  see how you can Use and Create  Assets in Development in the Rich client and other build tools.
Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz What’s New Part 5 Use and Create  Assets in Development

Learn what is new in this 6 part Webcast series.   In Part 6 of Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz  What’s New,  see how you have more flexible options for deploying RAM and where you can learn more information.
Rational Asset Manager v 7.2 on Jazz What Else is New

IBM Rational Software announces the September 24, 2009 availability of Rational Asset Manager v7.2. This is the fourth major release since the product was first launched 2 years and 3 months ago. Perhaps the most significant aspects of this release are:

1. Automated software asset governance that scales to the enterprise using custom Asset Lifecycle & policies.

2. Affordability for small, medium and large enterprises by leveraging flexible deployment and licensing options.

3. Enterprise Collaboration Application Lifecycle Management. Rational Asset Manager is now built with Jazz technology.

IBM Rational Asset Manager V7.2 enhancements and their benefits include:

• New Jazz-driven life-cycle management capabilities to manage asset workflow from concept, development, build, deployment and retirement. Reduce the costs of governing assets.

• New integrations with IBM Rational Team Concert and other Jazz built products. Connect and federate an asset’s metadata with the related Jazz Application Lifecycle Managed resources. Reduce maintenance costs of assets and reduce the time to find relevant asset resource information.

• Better quantify return on investment and allocate resources more effectively by using new asset and community level reports.  Visualize usage and popularity of assets with new graphical analytics.

• New Build Forge® integration integrates assets with the software assembly process. Control what goes out the door and reduce risks by ensuring builds use only approved assets. Automate asset publishing during the build process.

• New purchase options, IBM Rational Asset Manager Enterprise Edition and Standard Edition making it more affordable for all enterprise sizes.

The entire team is really excited to see this release get into the hands of customers.   There were early signs that this was going to be a great value add release based on the positive feedback we got during our beta program.

Here is a new Webcast that explains the business challenges associated with Enterprise Modernization and how Rational Asset Manager and Rational Quality Manager can help.

In this Webcast Brian Bryson the Market Manager for Quality Solutions and Carlos Ferreira the product manager for Rational Asset Manager describe how apply best practices, tools and strategies for lifecycle quality management of modernization projects. Manage your assets by being more efficient at creating, using and maintaining solutions for business advantage!

These days, everyone is talking about the need to do more with less. Challenging economic conditions have led to smaller development teams and intense pressure to shorten time to market and reduce costs. Pressure to meet legal, regulatory, internal and technical compliance requirements continues to grow and it’s difficult to keep up using only manual reviews. However, these challenges can drive companies to take shortcuts that may ultimately increase costs and result in the creation of software that’s difficult and costly to maintain, enhance or change to meet changing business needs. Companies often have trouble finding or even defining the high-value core competency assets that are driving business value in the organization. In situations like these, it’s essential to get control of and understand your assets to reduce your solution delivery costs.

Development teams sometimes turn to open source or third-party components to expedite development, but these components may not be supported in the long run or support contracts for maintenance may not be available, which means that troubleshooting problems in the future becomes next to impossible. Or, teams attempt to reduce development costs by outsourcing to a lower-cost provider. However, if the team has failed to properly store and document its assets, it can take providers weeks of initial work to search through thousands of work products scattered throughout a variety of domain-specific repositories before they find the assets they need, increasing the cost of the engagement.

In this White paper I explain how a definitive software library can be used to address these challenges and reduce costs associated with managing and using your software assets.

IBM Chemical and Petroleum Integrated Information Framework Solution is the latest offering to be powered by IBM Rational Asset Manager. Rational Asset Manager is helping to reduce costs by managing build time assets and the knowledge assets associated with petroleum industry domain specific events, models and services.

Rational Asset Manager provides the asset management services in IBM’s new BPM offering. The latest offering built with RAM is the BPM BlueWorks. You are able to publish, search and use BPM assets using the web client. RAM provides integrations with WebSphere Business Modeler and WebSphere Integration Developers technical teams that allows them to search from within their existing tools by connecting to RAM powered asset management repositories like the BPM BlueWorks site. This follows last month’s launch of RAM providing the asset management services for the IBM Blue Cloud

We made Rational Asset Manager Milestone 3 Beta 2 available to our customer in the managed beta program. We made some great improvements on the “Karen Hunt” Scenario. As part of the development process we try to focus on key scenarios and persona’s to help us make sure we are hitting the mark for function and usability. The “Karen Hunt” scenario involves a director or other business executive trying to publish an asset. We asked, “what are the expectations that needed to be achieved in this scenario?” Here were some of the answers that came to mind as we designed and built Milestone 3 Beta 2.

Our goal make it easy for directors or executives, who typically aren’t very technical, to publish assets. How did we measure our success?

1. Number of steps required to publish and asset. By reducing the number of dialogs, fields and confirmation buttons and choices required, we reduced complexity.

2. By not requiring any other software beyond what a typical executive would have on his desk like a browser. That includes making sure the default behavior of publishing an asset doesn’t require additional applets to load or require installing some rich client.

3. By making it fast. Fewer steps means faster. Getting things done fast means it’s easy.

4. By doing the work for them. We analyzed what were the typical categories, descriptions, images and links that business people would often add when submitting an asset. For example many would put the most common assets as links or images on the asset description. Or fill in asset attributes or categories with meta-data from an asset artifact. In the beta we make it easy to quickly pick which artifacts are featured in the asset description including even providing previews. This eliminates the need to waste time doing this when publishing an asset. In the beta, we also automate setting asset attribute and category values by providing templates and other techniques. We also found that business executives often only had one artifact in their assets. By defaulting immediately to uploading a single file as the first step this made it easier.

5. By doing usability tests with real business users.

Our motivators are not only our external customers but also internal competition. IBM often funds internal research projects to drive innovation. An internal community source tools began to offer very easy to use file sharing web application. Of course, it didn’t provide the asset management capabilities of a Definitive Software Library like Rational Asset Manager. However it did provide the team some extra motivation to make this beta so easy to use that even a business person could use it. In future posts I will describe how we also analyzed and improved the other extreme scenario of publishing a highly governed asset like a service lifecycle.

After using milestone 3, all I could think of is wait until customers see it. They are going to start using RAM to manage all their business assets and yes maybe even so of those personal ones too like photos, MP3s, videos.. I think this release is looking incredible. Once we deliver I will post some demo viewlets. If you can’t wait, join the beta program.

I am really excited to see the launch of the IBM Smart Business Developer and Test on the IBM Cloud. This is a technology preview of IBM’s Cloud technologies.    Many customers have private clouds or are using VPN public clouds to host their applications.   Having the elasticity to add more capacity quickly provide customers the ability to quickly react to increased demands for development and test services based on business needs or project lifecycles.   Having the ability to find the right set of Developer and Test cloud services, provision them and auto configure them so that you can be up in running in minutes is also a huge time savings compared to the past.  In the past customers would have to procure hardware, infrastructure services like application servers, database servers, web server and other security services.  After that, they would have to procure, install and configure the software needed to to be able to begin development and testing.   All of these steps could take months to do.   With the IBM Cloud this is now done in minutes. What is really compelling for me is that the IBM Cloud is being powered by IBM Rational Asset Manager.    I have written in previous postings, you must have a way to catalog these cloud services and virtual images so that people can reuse existing instances rather than instantiate or duplicate more instances of similar services that already exist.   This duplication incurs costs from wasted time to create these duplicate assets, increased network bandwith costs and increased server processing utilization costs.  The IBM Cloud shows how IBM is using Rational Asset Manager to manage these virtual images as assets. I recommend you try out the new IBM Cloud yourself.  You can access it here. Or take a peek below

Search for Virtual Images on the IBM Developer and Test Cloud