I am excited that the team recently updated IBM Rational Asset Manager to provide the milestone 3 download for our next release!  This will be the final milestone for 7.5.1 as the team now shifts focus to finalizing the product for delivery later this year.

All of the features planned for this release are included in this latest milestone. The team would love your feedback regarding how the release is shaping up.

While you’re visiting the milestone 3 download page, you’ll get the finer details about what’s new and noteworthy for this milestone. You’ll also have the opportunity to watch some short videos to see what the product looks like now. You might be interested to see the changes in these areas:

Lifecycle improvements: The new lifecycle support significantly improves the administration of lifecycles. Administrators have more control to keep lifecycles consistent by allowing lifecycles to be defined and then extended from lifecycles at the repository and community scope. If someone accesses the assets, they can find additional customized guidance about how to participate in a review or contribute to the asset. The team can use the summary status to know what remains to be done for an asset.

Ease-of-use improvements: This milestone contains several updates to make your use of the product easier. You can customize the attributes that are displayed for an asset so that you can highlight the most important information for your users.  Anyone who searches for assets can see a simplified set of results in which all of the versions for one asset are grouped and only the latest version is shown. The My Feed dashboard view provides an overview of recent activity. You can use this view to stay updated on activity in assets that you are contributing to or interested in.

Performance improvements: Performance is improved for several scenarios, including downloading larger assets and creating or updating assets that have many relationships.

Expanded integrations: The strength of integrations with other tools continues to expand with a Microsoft Office add-in. With that add-in, you can update content directly back to an asset. In addition, Lotus Connections 3.0 is now supported. You can use a new Lotus Connections widget to publish files to Rational Asset Manager.

The development team has many more details available about updates to the product. Try it out and provide your feedback or questions in the forums.

Thanks for helping us guide the development of the next release of Rational Asset Manager!

David K Hodges
Development Manager, Rational Asset Manager