Rational Team Concert knows your project teams, their internal organization, and the artifacts they are working on. It greatly simplifies the access to team-related information or performing team-related operations. For example, in order to subscribe to a feed with all events specific to a team, just select the team in the user interface and select ‘Subscribe to Team Events’ from the context menu.

Here are some of the top features:

• Your team’s artifacts
• What you are interested in
• Setup a team
• Join a team
• Staying on top of things
• Presence and chat in context
• Choose a provider: Sametime, Jabber and friends
• Create links on the fly

Your team’s artifacts

Rational Team Concert makes it easy for you to explore the artifacts that are related to your team and the things they are working on. In the Eclipse-based IDE, select a team area in the Team Organization view and open the team area editor. The Artifacts section of the editor displays all the artifacts associated with the team area.

What you are interested in

You can configure the Team Artifacts view to only show artifacts associated with teams you are interested in. You first connect to a project area. You can then use the Customize filter toolbar action. The filters configure which team areas are visible and whether to include archived or deleted artifacts.

What else does the Team Artifacts view show? Under the Repository connections node, you have a listing of the repository connections you have configured. The Feeds node lists the feeds that are configured for your Rational Team Concert client to allow you to easily follow what changes are occurring in your areas of interest. My Repository Workspaces displays all the repository workspaces that you have created for your current repository connections. The My Team Areas domain shows you all the team areas that you belong to. Work Item History keeps track of the work items you have looked at in your Rational Team Concert client for easier future navigation.

Set up a team

To set-up a team, you use the Members section of a team area or project area editor. Depending on the configuration of your user directory service, you can add users to the team by creating a new user, importing a user from the directory service, or simply adding an existing user.

In the Eclipse-based IDE, when saving the editor after new members have been added, you will be prompted to send out team invitations via email. You can also explicitly generate and send invitations. In the Members section of the team area or project area editor, you pick the new team member(s) and select Invite to Join Team from the context menu.

Join a team

When you receive an invitation to join a team, you can either use the URL in the invitation to start using the Rational Team Concert web UI, or you can accept the invitation using the Rational Team Concert Eclipse-based IDE.

To accept a team invitation in the Eclipse-based IDE, click on the Accept Team Invitation toolbar action in the Team Artifacts view, or choose Accept Team Invitation from the File menu.

Accepting the invitation will:

• Create a repository connection and allow you to log into that repository
• Connect you to the project area that you are working within
• Open the editor for the team area or project area that you are joining
• Create and display a set of initial work items for you to use as a guide for getting started (optionally, based on the configured process)

Staying on top of things

Rational Team Concert makes it easy for you to stay on top of what is going on in your teams using events and feeds. Three feeds are generated automatically for you that will keep you informed of all the interesting changes:

• build events from your team areas
• team events for all of the team areas that you belong to within the connected project areas
• work item events for all changes to your work items

Team areas, users, and work item queries are excellent sources of events and feeds.

In the Rational Team Concert Eclipse client, choose any of these objects, open the context menu, and choose one of the event or feed-related actions. The feeds can be managed from the Feeds domain in the Team Artifacts view. The events you receive can be reviewed in the Event Log, which can be opened using the context menu for a feed. You can use the feed URLs and read the feeds in your favorite feed reader.

Presence and chat in context

Rational Team Concert supports synchronous collaboration. See the presence of other Rational Team Concert users, start a chat, send files, and so on. Collaboration is fully integrated. Wherever a user is shown, its on-line status and chatting actions are available, too.

Choose a provider: Sametime, Jabber & friends

Do you use IBM Lotus Sametime Connect? Good news: Rational Team Concert fully integrates with Sametime. This means that you can see presence of Sametime contacts in Rational Team Concert, update your Sametime presence and initiate chats from Rational Team Concert.

In addition to the IBM Lotus Sametime Connect integration, Rational Team Concert also provides a simple Jabber-based chat client.

Use this collaboration provider to integrate into an existing Jabber-based collaboration infrastructure, such as Google Talk.

Create links on the fly

Instead of pasting links into your chat windows, you can link to a work item by typing its type name and its id (e.g defect 991).

The built-in chat client and the Lotus Sametime integration both support this kind of link. Click on a link, and the corresponding item will open in Rational Team Concert.