Hot on the heels of announcing our first-class presence on Jazz.net, the Rational Team Concert for System z team is very proud to announce the general availability of our 2.0.0.1 release, now available for download. Rational Team Concert for System z 2.0.0.1 contains all the functionality and supports all the distributed platforms that Rational Team Concert 2.0.0.1 supports. Rational Team Concert for System z then goes beyond by providing many new features designed to support System z development and the ability to run the product server code on the System z platform, giving you the ability to take advantage of the qualities of service provided by the System z platform.

Here is a quick 10,000-foot view of these new features:

Platform Extension
The Rational Team Concert for System z server runs on both Linux for System z and z/OS. You also now have the option of using DB2 for System z as the backing database.

External SCM Integration
There are numerous mature SCMs currently being used by System z customers. Some are true products, such as SCLM, while others are home-grown solutions. Rational Team Concert for System z provides functionality that makes it possible for these external SCMs to integrate with the Rational Team Concert for System z product. The integration allows you to create hyperlinks from work items to host-based artifacts and allows an external SCM to easily interrogate the current status of a work item to see if its state is correct for the SCM operation being performed.

Mass Import
You can quickly import System z artifacts stored in Partitioned Data Sets into a specified set of Rational Team Concert for System z managed projects. Do you fancy kicking the tires on Rational Team Concert for System z? Use this tool to quickly pull in some existing source code and start playing!

Rational Build Server
Rational Team Concert for System z introduces a new build engine capable of communicating with any Build Forge Agent resident on any distributed platform or one running on a System z machine. Rational Team Concert for System z leverages this new build engine in its  build scripting language. And to make things simple, we have also included the Build Forge Agents in the Rational Concert for System z packaging so they are easy to find and easy to install.

Apache Ant build scripting language
The Apache Ant scripting language is a well-known and well-used tool for writing build scripts for distributed platforms. Rational Team Concert for System z has extended this language by adding a number of System z extensions to it. This means you are now able to use a common scripting language to drive builds on both distributed platforms and on a System z platform.

For a more in-depth look at these features, read our 2.0.0.1 New & Noteworthy.

We look forward to your comments and suggestions as you start using this new 2.0.0.1 release. Remember, you are all invited to submit a work item for an enhancement or potential issue you are having, or you can ask a question in the forum.

Thanks and enjoy!

Guy Slade
Chief Programmer
and the whole Rational Team Concert for System z Development Team