Rational Asset Manager Milestone 3 Beta 2 Made Available

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.

IBM Cloud Powered by Rational Asset Manager

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

Model Driven Service Development using a Definitive Software Library

This demonstration developed by Dr Gili Mendel, shows how a software release and all it’’s related assets can be managed using a definitive software library.    In the scenario an existing Web application has been released and is deployed.  The application displays user profile information.  It utilizes an User Profile Service that returns the user information.  A new version of the application is being developed to also provide the zip code information about a user’s address.   Using Rational Asset Manager and it’s integrations with Rational Software Architect, Rational Team Concert and Build Management you will see:

1  The existing deployed v1 application that will be enhanced with a new service.

2.  How an architect can find the software models, services, data models and other components that were used to build the deployed application.

3.  How an architect can create a new version for the service models to address a requirement.  How this model generates Service Specifications and automatically publishes the new models and services to RAM.

4.  How the governance process of reviews must happen by stake holders before the developer, Build and release engineer / process can use this new versions of the service in the new application version.

5.  How the developer uses and SCM process to manage multiple versions of the specification until it is ready to be published to the DSL/RAM as a new service specification.

6.  How the developer uses reference’s to components and service specifications rather than copy binaries into his workspace, thus ensuring he is used the approved versions.  How RAM can automate publishing assets like setting service name space attributes.

7.  How the build process can only used approved versions of the assets and publishes back the ear implementation to RAM and automatically updates the asset relationships to manage dependencies.  Including meta data about where the service is deployed.  RAM controls permissions to assets, read and or download or publishing.

8.  See the deployed application running and the updated DSL/RAM that shows all the updated asset relationships to reflect the new dependencies on the services.  Much of this metadata is automatically set using the RAM integrations with the development tools.

This demonstration was recently given at the Rational Software Conference.   To see the viewlet in a larger mode right mouse click on the viewlet and select zoom in.   You can then pan by pressing the mouse on the viewlet and dragging the mouse around.

Establishing and Populating a Definitive Software Library

An article titled “Establishing and Populating a Definitive Software Library” was published in the The Rational Edge.  This article you can “Learn how a Definitive Software Library can help bridge the gap between software delivery and operations in the context of software deployment, including the products that make up the solution and how they can be used together to reduce business risk and improve efficiency.”

It was written by:

Leigh Williamson, IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM
Dr. Gili Mendel, STSM, Rational Asset Manager Architect, IBM
Grant Larsen, STSM, Chief Architect – Asset Management, IBM
Greg Rader, Software Development Governance Solution Architect, IBM

Recruiting for Rational Asset Manager Managed Beta

We are working on the next version of Rational Asset Manager.    Our last major release was Rational Asset Manager v7.1.1  at the end of Dec 2008.     We will shortly be making a milestone beta release of our next major version available.  We want to get both existing customer and new customer feedback.   We are providing some key missing capabilities that customers have asked for around governing their assets.   If you are interested in participating in this managed beta please send us an email at ratlbeta@us.ibm.com

We have limited space, so we will consider all candidates with the best fit for achieving our goals for the beta program.   Please apply for the Beta Program.   The minimum commitment requires you to install the milestone driver,  use it for a few hours or more.   Provide feedback on the scenarios we provide you.   Feedback consists of attending 3 – one hour feedback and enablement meetings.   We also ask that you complete a usability survey.    In return you get to see the next release of the product before the general public does.  You also get to influence what improvements we should make in the product for this release to improve the usability, quality and value of the product.

Thanks!

New Article on Publishing Business Process Assets

Business Processes are a very good example of an asset that needs to be shared by multiple roles  across different organizations.   Team members like developers, business analysts, support organizations and operations teams often need to understand what are the published business processes being used and how do they impact and relate to other assets in their organization.    In this Developerworks article Murray Beaton and team describe how to configure and use WebSphere Business Modeler and Rational Asset Manager to create, publish, govern and share business process models.

Al Zollar Keynote RSC 2009 Managing Assets

Some very good sessions happened this week at Rational Software Conference.   Al Zollar gave an excellent keynote presentation at the Rational Software Conference 2009.  Al Zollar is the General Manager of IBM Tivoli.  He explained how companies have to deliver smarter products using many kinds of assets.  Assets that include Intellectual property assets, software assets and hardware assets.  He describes how Rational and Tivoli solutions working together can provide comprehensive asset lifecyle and services across both development and operations.   He described how Rational Asset Manager is a key part of delivering these assets and bridging software and operations.   He describes how multiple products from Rational and Tivoli integrated with Rational Asset Manager to deliver this solution, including Tivoli CMDB.

Fast forward to minute 30 in Al Zollar’s WebCast to hear and see him present how to do asset management using a definitive software library.

Rational Asset Manager was also identified as a key part of “Tools for the Cloud”  and “Tools in the Cloud” in the newly announced IBM Developer Cloud Services.

You can see a demonstration of the Rational Asset Manager and Tivoli CMDB Integration here.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/offers/lp/demos/summary/r-ramtcmbi.html?S_TACT=105AGX01&S_CMP=HP

Rational Software Conference Presentations

Here are some of the presentations that we will be delivering while at the Rational Software Conference.

MAC04-ModelDrivenDevWithDSL

SDP09-IntroductionToRAM

Preview of Rational Insight Reporting Integration

For those of you that can’t be here at the Rational Software Conference I wanted to give you a preview of part of the demonstration we will be giving in  SDP09  Introduction to Rational Asset Manager.   Customers have asked for more reporting capabilities and we have introduced a Rational Asset Manager integration with the the Rational Insight Reporting product.   This integration works with Rational Asset Manager v7.1.1 and later.   Watch this quick and interesting demonstration showing 2 common Rational Asset Manager reporting requests.  Show me assets that have been in a state of under review for more than a certain amount of time.  This shows you where the bottlenecks are in your review process.   Show me the financial savings of my asset libraries.  This shows you how much Rational Asset Manager is saving you.

Tip – Accessing Asset Repository Metadata

In the past I have wanted to create reports or just share categories or ontologies that are in RAM with other applications.   A good example of this is lets say you have created a categorization in RAM that represents your organizational business structure and you would like to share that ontology with another repository like ClearQuest for setting a field value for a change request    Or perhaps you have asset types that you would like make available as a selection list that someone could chose as a filtering option to create  a custom report.   Here is a tip that might help you with getting this asset repository metadata as XML simply using a URL.

Sample URL – Retrieves the Asset Types

http://YourRamServerHostname:9080/ram/classif/assetTypesSchema.xmi

Sample URL – retrieves the categories for a category schema named “Application Platform Taxonomy”

http://YourRamServerHostname:9080/ram/classif/applicationplatformtaxonomy.xmi

To figure out the schema name login as adminstrator and hover over the category name in the Administration, Configuration, Category listings.  See image below.