You might remember that in August I asked Dekel Cohen of Mainsoft to write a blog posting about their document collaboration product.  My motivation to ask him came from our technical conversations. While our conversation is still going strong the topics we talk about have changed. He and his team are busy working on a closer integration of Lotus Connections and Rational Team Concert. While the product is not yet ready, good technology is on its way. Reason enough for me to ask if they could keep all of us in the loop. Jonas Martinsson was happy to do so.

Kai-Uwe Maetzel, Jazz Foundation PMC

Lotus Connections Integration with Rational Team Concert – Preview

by Jonas Martinsson

In collaboration with IBM Rational and IBM Lotus, the Mainsoft development team is gearing up to launch a technology preview which integrates the Lotus Connections social network server with Rational Team Concert.

This video introduces you to many new collaboration capabilities offered in the technology preview, which let you quickly identify, connect with, and exchange ideas with a wide community of IT and enterprise stakeholders, partners, and end users through forums, wikis, blogs, file sharing, and bookmark sharing, all from within the Team Concert Web interface.

>> Watch the Video <<

Hover the mouse cursor over a user in Rational Team Concert to see the business card with information from both the enterprise social network on Lotus Connections and from Jazz. The business card shows you the user’s full profile and social network activities, including photo, contact details, the time zone he’s in, and information about his expertise, areas of interest, and links to his social network activities.  You can also add the user as a colleague and download his contact details.  The production release will automatically sync Lotus Connections profiles with Jazz profiles, so you don’t need to maintain both.

You can associate Jazz work items with Lotus Connections activities to coordinate efforts across organizational boundaries. Linked activities let technical and non-technical users work together on shared goals, in ways that are not possible today. It is also simple to send micro-blog updates about what you’re currently working on from your Work Items.

A new social viewlet in the project dashboard gives you a window into the contents on the Lotus Connections server. From here, you can view and search users, communities, blogs, activities, and bookmarks as well as post status updates to stay up to date with your team, workgroups, and enterprise stakeholders.

This integration will help distributed agile teams to collaborate more effectively with peer teams as well as non-IT stakeholders, e.g. business analysts, sales teams, partners, and potentially even customers.

Check back in a few weeks to give the technology preview a try!