Rational Team Concert has a built-in integration with IBM Connections. This integration brings the power of social software to development teams and empowers business stakeholders to easily connect with development projects. Some social features of Rational Team Concert:

• Social Software Demo
• Tap into your social network
• Link projects to communities
• Access users’ social network profiles
• The social network viewlet on the project dashboard
• People Search
• Posting status updates and activities from work items

Demo

Tap into your social network

The built-in integration of IBM Connections social software in Rational Team Concert 3.0.1 provides many new collaboration capabilities that allow you to identify, connect with, and exchange ideas with a wide community of business and technical stakeholders, partners, and end users. You can:

• Learn more about your colleagues, by accessing their complete social profile
• Find out what’s happening in your community, blogs, wikis, and activities
• Search for contacts based on their experience, skills, or key relationships
• Publish work items as IBM Connections activities or microblog status updates
• Microblog ideas and status updates from the dashboard
• And more …

Link projects to communities

Associating an IBM Connections community with a project gives you direct access to community features such as wikis, blogs, and forums, from within Team Concert. All project members are automatically added as members of the IBM Connections community.

Access users’ social network profiles

When you hover over a username, Rational Team Concert presents a business card tooltip with information about the user. By integrating with IBM Connections, you get the user’s complete social network profile and activities, including photo, contact details, his local time, and information about his expertise, areas of interest, and what he’s working on at the moment. The connector automatically synchronizes IBM Connections profiles with Rational Team Concert profiles.

The social network viewlet on the project dashboard

A social network viewlet is added to your project dashboard and provides a window into the social network site.

Use the viewlet’s area selector to quickly switch between different areas on the social network, including:

• Activities
• Blogs
• Bookmarks
• Communities
• Files (supported in production release only)
• User profiles
• Wikis (supported in production release only)

You can filter the entries in each view, search inside the area views, and drill down into visible entries using the tag cloud. Click the status update icon in the top right of the viewlet to post microblog status updates to your social network directly from Rational Team Concert.

Next to the status update icon, click the project community link to open the social network community associated with the current Rational Team Concert project. From the icon menu, you can also access the community feed, to stay up to date on community activities within the Rational Team Concert environment.

People search

Discover and grow your enterprise social network from Team Concert. Find technical and business contacts across the enterprise based on their experience, skills, or key relationships.

Posting status updates and activities from work items

IBM Connections activities are integrated into your Team Concert Work Item view, enabling you to create new activity entries on IBM Connections. You can also microblog status updates directly from the Work Item. Sharing progress with your social network will become a natural part of your daily tasks.

For example, you can use forums to gather feedback from early adopters; author specifications collaboratively on a wiki, and, as product manager, you can blog about the product roadmap. The social network will engage developers, testers, and builders as you share work updates while progressing towards the shared goal of a software delivery.