I just listened to a good podcast from Grant Larsen. He is our Chief Architect for asset management standards and strategies. He was instrumental in creating the Reusable Asset Specification from the Object Management Group, and has been helping Dr. Gili Mendel craft the specification for the “asset management” domain in the OSLC.

Grant has worked with many of our customers, and shares some lessons learned:

1. Never roll out as a big bang
2. Use an on-boarding server, a sandbox
3. Configure RAM with the perspective of the asset consumer rather than the producer
4. Content doesn’t have to be managed within RAM (link to it, rather than copy it)
5. Top-down support critical, while allowing for bottom-up acceptance

He goes on to talk about reusable services, approved open source components, and purchased commercial assets. Check it out here!

For my first post on the blog, I’m pleased to announce Rational Asset Manager v7.2.0.1!

This is a service pack release.  It includes some small enhancements that customers told us they needed.  Here is where you can find more information:

Install Guide

Release Notes

Here are some of the new and noteworthy “goodies” in this release:

Support for Websphere version 7.0

• Now Rational Asset Manager version 7.2.0.1 can be installed on WAS version 7.0. The recommended Fix pack version is 7  i.e 7.0.0.7

WSRR 7 Integration support

• RAM 7.2.0.1 supports integration with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository 7.0

Improved Search Relevance

• New factors are included in the search relevance algorithm. These include asset popularity, asset version, and asset modification date. This ensures that the most relevant assets are displayed first in search results

Cloud Support

• RAM 7.2.0.1 is now available on the IBM Cloud. Once you have an account, you can go to the control panel and add an instance of RAM 7.2.0.1

RAM 7.2.0.1 on the Cloud

New Lifecycle Configuration Options

• When defining a lifecycle transition rule you can now specify reviewers who must approve or reject the asset to continue to the next state. It’s also possible to configure whether state collaborators will receive e-mail notifications.

New Lifecyce Configuration Options

Create work items on a remote RTC server

• You can now create new work items on a remote RTC server from within RAM. You can do this either through a custom attribute or in a forum post. You still must have credentials on the remote RTC server.

Work item preview

• Work item previews are now embedded in the page, instead of being displayed as a popup. This allows you to view more than one work item at a time. When hovering over a work item link, a plus icon will appear. Clicking that icon will open a section showing the details of the work item.

Work item preview

…. And more!

To see some of these new features in action, you can create an instance of RAM 7.2.0.1 on the IBM cloud.

Your comments/suggestions/feedback are appreciated as always.



This document discusses step by step instructions on how to migrate your development environment to the test environment using IBM Rational Asset Manager to help ensure the quality of your software development.

Content

Last month I presented at our Rational Voice Event.   The session covered how to establish an asset governance process in your organization and how to configure Rational Asset Manager to implement that governance process.  This material is intended for an architect, developer, manager or administrator who is implementing Rational Asset Manager, communities, policies and asset life cycles to manage software assets. I thought the presentation would be valuable to other customers who weren’t able to attend the event, so I am publishing it here  RAMDeepDive-Voice

This was the last customer facing session that I have done as the product manager for Rational Asset Manager.   I am pleased and thankful to have brought Rational Asset Manager to market and participated in the product’s and customer’s successes.  The last three years have been a great and rewarding experience.  I  have enjoyed working with the RAM customers and product team.   I have a new  role in IBM.  Derek Baron is the new product manager who will soon be posting articles on the RAM Insider Blog and working with you.

We have been getting lots of questions around how developers and architects can reference open source components, WSDLs or other binaries that are under governance in their workspace?    Dr Gili Mendel recently wrote an explanation on this that I wanted to share with you below.   By referencing the artifacts in the DSL you prevent teams from having to repeatedly copy asset artifacts around or version the same component multiple times in different SCM systems.   This has the added benefit of allowing you to control access to these components and shut them off when licenses expire or the asset artifacts are no longer supported.

“How does the workspace know how to consume one of these linked artifacts, such as an open source component”

Workspace Link to a RAM artifact

When you “drag” an artifact from a RAM repository into your workspace, the RAM plugin brings down the  file to your workspace (so that you can use it disconnected as well), but it marks it as a derived resource.  A derived resource will not be checked in/out a SCM by Eclipse…. similar to a compiled .class file.

The RAM plugin will also create a link (an entry for that artifact in a control file see image below).   This control file (or changes to this control file) will be checked into the SCM.   When another user checks out this file (or changes to this file), the RAM plugin will parse it, and will bring down the artifacts to that users as well.

The build process can use RAM provided Ant scripts, Ant lib. calls, or Java Calls to bring down “linked” artifacts.   These calls look for the rambuildercontrol.xml file and act on it in a headless environment

Traceability when publishing an artifact into RAM

The Eclipse client provides an asset packaging editor that allow you to provide information about the asset (name, description, version….) as well as a collection of resources from your workspace.   When press the submit/update button, the editor will baseline the projects involved (if it is a TEAM based project, like CVS, Rational Team Concert, Subversion, ClearCase….) and publish the asset annotating (the server, baseline id and such) the artifact with the origin’s information.   The build process, as I noted in the demo,  annotated the .ear with a the build id, and a link back to the BuildForge job or other build automation software.

When a user consumes an asset in Eclipse, the Rational Asset Manager plugin will look for these traceability annotation on the artifacts.   If they exist, the plugin will give you the option to attach to the baseline, or the latest stream level.



This week we had the Rational Voice event, where we meet with a select group of customers to discuss our product road maps and do a deep dive on product capabilities.   I wanted to share the slides we presented at the deep dive session on how to define an asset governance model in Rational Asset Manager v7.2 .  In the session we covered what the governance constructs were in Rational Asset Manager and what the best practices are for establishing a definitive software library.   Here are the slides. If you are interested in participating in future Rational Voice events send me an email and I can get you added to our select group of customers that are invited to the event.  carlos.ferreira at us.ibm.com

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.