Today we are announcing that Rational Team Concert 3.0 will be generally available on November 23, 2010. Visit the Rational Team Concert project page to learn more and get the highlights of what’s new!

In addition to the enhancements in the main product functions, there have been significant changes to the licensing and deployment models based on both feedback and lessons learned as the family of Jazz products expands.*

Platforms

We’ve simplified the packaging and platform support so that in 3.0 there is only one product that supports all our platforms. Instead of the model in 2.X with separate products and servers for these platforms, they have been merged. A new Team Concert Developer for IBM Enterprise Platforms contains advanced features focused on the needs of System z and IBM i development teams, I introduced some of them in the Part II Source Control enhancement blog.

This means that the server can run on ANY supported platform, and you can purchase users licenses for the function or capabilities that your team needs.

The Jazz Team Server

Adrian explained the design goals of the split between products, applications, and the Jazz Team Server a couple of months ago. The 3.0 release of Rational Team Concert is the first of our products with this new architecture. In addition to improved navigation and flexible deployment, these enhancements offer several advantages for administrators and enterprise customers:

• Under the covers, the Jazz Team Server is basically a hub for integrating common data. In a set of applications, it allows users, licenses, and personal dashboards to be shared.
• As an administrator, the first thing you’ll notice is that there are now two applications running on your server: the CCM (Change and Configuration Management) and the JTS (Jazz Team Server).
• As an administrator of several instances of Team Concert 2.X, during the upgrade to 3.0 you can optionally choose to share the same JTS and benefit from increased license re-use and lower administration costs for managing users, repository permissions, and licenses.
• As we make new applications available, you will be able to install licenses into the same JTS, and share users and licenses across the applications. This will be very useful as we release upgraded versions of RQM and RRC as part of our CLM initiative. It’s also useful in the setup of distributed source control as explained in Part II: Source Control enhancements.

Licensing

We’ve made three important licensing changes based on your feedback:

• You can now install as many servers as you have user licenses.
  Benefits: This means that you can deploy client access licenses across as many or as few servers as you need. The most common advantages are to support disaster recovery installations, maintain separate test or training configurations, and enable teams who need many servers for physical security isolation.

• Added a new user license called “Rational Team Concert Stakeholder”.
  Benefits: An entry priced license for users who don’t have to use the planning capabilities but instead simply want to use work items and dashboards to collaborate with a team. A typical user role for Stakeholder licenses might be users of your software who need to report defects or view project status.

• Added a new user license called “Rational Team Concert Developer for Workgroups”.
  Benefits: An entry-priced Developer license that is limited to fifty Authorized Users per server.** “Developer for Workgroups” is identical to “Developer” except it does not support the new Distributed Source Control feature and it only supports Authorized User licenses. “Developer for Workgroups” can be combined with any other 3.x license on the same server. This allows teams to grow beyond fifty developers without having to trade-in their existing “Developer for Workgroups” licenses.

Fixed Term Licenses

We’ve also added support for fixed term licenses, available at an affordable annual renewal rate. If you have a temporary need for more licenses to add to your team, now you can easily do so.

Conclusion

Stay tuned for the new downloads page which will have a lot more details about the different licenses and official list of supported platforms.

Jean-Michel Lemieux
Chief Architect for Rational Team Concert

* Our lawyers would like me to remind you that these are not finalized plans or commitments…just work in progress and plans are subject to change without notice. See the Terms of Use.

** If you manage them with a shared license server, then you are only permitted to have a total of 50 Developer for Workgroups licenses installed across the set of servers using the same shared license server.