I’m thrilled to announce our forthcoming collaborative lifecycle management release, the culmination of many months of intense development activity by multiple teams within Rational.

On June 14, 2011, the 3.0.1 releases of Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager and Rational Requirements Composer will become generally available. You’ll be able to download trial versions right here at Jazz.net and obtain the software through other IBM channels including IBM Passport Advantage.

The adoption of the “3.0.1” label for all of these products is significant. While earlier releases of all three products integrated to form a solution of lifecycle management capabilities, this release not only enhances these capabilities significantly, it delivers them on a new shared architecture that offers increased flexibility and scalability and simplified serviceability. This architecture, first seen in Rational Team Concert 3.0, delivers on our theme of reducing the total cost of ownership and administration with:

• Simplified packaging and licensing
• Simplified installation with a single common install for all three products
• More flexible deployment options and harmonized platform and language support
• Unified administration
• A great sample application demonstrating the full set of lifecycle management capabilities

Pursuing a second theme of improved traceability and visibility, we’ve made significant improvements to cross-product reporting with a single, shared data warehouse and Cognos-based customized reporting with the included Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence, enhanced traceability views and lifecycle queries, personal dashboards shared across all applications and a mini dashboard that is always just a single click away. Finally, we’ve enhanced the integrations between the products with a shared work items service, more link types and a more consistent and powerful user interface.

As we’ve been counting down the days to the release, various team members have been blogging about the many new features in this release. Check out Jared Pulham’s recent post on the new requirements definition and management capabilities, Ben Pasero’s post on our new cross-product sample application, and Paul Tasillo’s post on the powerful new reporting features. As the countdown to the release day continues, we’ll be publishing other posts related to this release. In an upcoming post, Dirk Baeumer will describe the new enhancements in change and configuration management. We’re also busy preparing articles, videos, and presentations that will tell you more about the new features and help you get the most out of this release.

The CLM 2011 release is a fantastic example of how Rational’s Jazz-powered products can facilitate improved collaboration and productivity across an organization. When we began this effort in 2010, we had to align the efforts of five separate development teams with the Jazz Foundation, RTC, RQM and RRC teams as well as the Insight team delivering Rational Reporting for Development Intelligence. While we had already proved to ourselves that we could collaborate within these teams using RTC, RQM and RRC, our combined effort required us to align varying processes and track and report status across multiple project areas and servers. Over time we saw our collective velocity increase as we reduced friction and realized the synergy from our collaborative efforts. Throughout this effort our own CLM dashboard has tracked our progress.

As with previous releases, jazz.net has played a critical role in producing this release. We published milestones of RTC, RQM and RRC throughout the entire development cycle and received continuous feedback from the Jazz.net community in the form of defects and enhancement work items as well as forum discussions. Continuing our history of self-hosting, we also deployed each milestone to our own internal and public Jazz.net servers, subjecting the code to constant testing by our teams and community users who provided timely and continuous feedback. Thank you for your contributions on Jazz.net. They’re an invaluable part of our development process.

Our whole team is really excited to make this release available. We look forward to continuing our dialog with you.

Look for the downloads on Jazz.net on June 14!

Adrian Cho, Development Manager, Collaborative Lifecycle Management