• Supports OSLC based linking, and Eclipse client integration with RTC 3.0
• Enhances our OSLC for Requirements Management support to include linking Assets with Requirements in Rational DOORS
• Supports Rational Insight data warehousing and ETL for uber reporting!
• You can use a policy on your assets to launch an automation project in Rational Build Forge, e.g: when a deploy-able asset such as an EAR get approved, it can automatically invoke an automation project to get it deployed
• The “modify reviewer” policy has been improved to support configuring collaboration options, and adding user groups dynamically based on your asset attribute
• Copy attributes between assets
• … and more!

You learn more about this release on the Rational Asset Manager 7.5.0.1 New and Noteworthy page!

On behalf of the entire team, Happy New Year!

-Derek Baron

The topic is oriented around collaborative lifecycle management (CLM) processes and how to use RAM to effectively share or reference CLM assets throughout the organization. Dr. Gili does a free-wheeling demo, so check it out!

Check out the new and noteworthy; it includes videos on many of the new features.

I hope you enjoy the five-part video series, illustrating the value of RAM for practitioners during key points in the software development lifecycle.

On behalf of the entire product team, I’d like to thank thank our large community of users and design partners for their feedback and involvement, helping this to be the most powerful and usable release to date.

In this movie, Dr. Gili Mendel extends the ALE series (by Derek Baron) and provides a technical perspective on the development of service specification and implementation.

Checkout the What’s New page on Jazz.net to learn more about the milestone release:

NOTE: If the images appear fuzzy, just click on them to get a clearer view.

The first place you might look is the Asset Type Constraints :

And since there is no section on categorization constraints, there appears to be no control.

You may have noticed the tab supporting automatic categorization, which is a cool topic I will cover another time.

However, back to the point of this post. RAM provides lifecycle policies to help enforce rules for categorization. These are managed as part of the Lifecycle configuration:

There are two related to Categorization:

These can be set to run at specific states and at certain times, such as when the asset enters a state. Yet while policies might prevent you from changing the state of an asset, they do not prevent you from submitting a new asset to the repository.

The first one can add/remove categories explicitly:

The second can help enforce the rule that a category is selected:

So now, when an asset is created, it can be enforced that categorization must be applied before it can transition to the next state:

1. Someone submits an Asset (the policy doesn’t stop this)

2. When they try to move the state, the policy fails:

You can View results to see why the policy failed:

Lifecycle policies can be very powerful, and with a little creativity you can automate many of your business rules.

Having just returned from IMPACT 2010, I thought you might enjoy a little mini-series on SOA Governance with our bundle of RAM and WSRR.

Here’s the introduction and part 1, which includes a demo. I’ll continue the series with parts 2-4 so keep an eye out here!