How are you connecting your project teams with all of their data? How are you breaking down the barriers and walls between teams and tools? Developers need to talk to testers, business analysts need to see what project managers are committing to in a release, and executives want to know that teams are working together to deliver promised products. But how do we get all of these people working together when their managed data is stored across different repositories and each of them is using different tools? Even some organizations have multiple development tools or multiple test tools depending on the team’s focus or perhaps the legacy of project member experience.

The strategy for the IBM CLM tools platform is to deliver a connected and integrated tool experience for collaborative lifecycle management. This is extended to DevOps and even methods like the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®). All of the connected tools working in CLM were integrated through the Jazz Team Server and enable linking though a service known as the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC). OSLC allows developers to connect their committed work items to stories and use cases in DOORS NG and to tests in RQM using OSLC links that can be used for navigation and reporting. This makes it so much easier to bring dispersed teams together and keep everyone in sync.

But what if one (or more) of your teams is using a tool from another vendor that is not aligned with OSLC? We have extended our integration strategy to incorporate select third-party development tools in the marketplace and extend CLM to heterogeneous environments. We’ve done this with the Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapter – Tasktop Edition (RLIA TE).

As you might suspect from the name of the product, RLIA Tasktop Edition, IBM has partnered with Tasktop to OEM and deliver their best-in-class integration solution as part of the IBM RLIA solution. So in RLIA TE, we get the dedicated focus of an integrations company to support the IBM CLM solution.

If you’ve heard anything about RLIA in the past, you might know that we had two “flavors”. We had a version called “Standard Edition” and another called “Tasktop Edition”. One of them linked data between two tools using OSLC and the other synchronized data. Now RLIA TE 1.1.4 and the newest mod release RLIA TE 1.1.5 support the ability to sync, link, or a combination of both.

So no matter what method your team wants to use, you can apply the one that makes the most sense for your way of working. Synchronization will give you a replica of the data in both integrated tools and allow you to configure either side as the master or keep them both as equal editable items. Linking using OSLC will allow you to simply connect items in either tool as a reference and support the ability to easily navigate from one tool to the other or use the OSLC rich hover capability to float over the link and see the current values from the data on the other end of the link (within the CLM tool).

So now you have no excuse for keeping project teams separated in different repositories and tools just because the logo on the tool’s box isn’t the same. You can get the benefits of aligned project teams working in near real-time, 24/7.

RLIA Tasktop Edition 1.1.4 can be downloaded as a trial or demo for 90 days from jazz.net. RLIA 1.1.4 supports the following 3^rd party tools: CA PPM, Version One (Enterprise Agility), Mingle, Rally Dev, Serena Business Manager, MS Team Foundation Server, BMC Remedy, IBM Bluemix, Polarion, GitHub, Bugzilla, Jira, HP ALM Quality Center, IBM CLM (RTC, RQM and DOORS NG) and IBM ClearQuest.