IBM Rational Clearcase 7.0 Released!

Twit This!

Just as I suspected, IBM Rational released their newest version of their Flagship products ClearCase and ClearQuest. I am trying to get my hands on the release so that I can update my training materials for my fall session.

Among the changes that have been announced are the following:

• IBM Rational ClearQuest® is extended to enable tracking of when a build starts and ends, and can maintain a solid record of other status information. It can automatically track each milestone as a release progresses through the build cycles, test harnesses, and established approval gates before deployment into production.
  
• The records for build and deployment can be associated with each other, and with other development artifacts such as requirements, code changes, test cases and test results, enabling traceability across the full lifecycle.
  
• With the integration of IBM Rational Build Forge®, detailed build information can be automatically created and updated, allowing for detailed audit records and extended traceability.
  
• 
  IBM Rational ClearCase® and IBM Rational ClearQuest can also be integrated with IBM Tivoli® Provisioning Manager. This enables deployment of approved build files directly from the source code repository into a variety of test environments, and into production.
  
• Delivers software configuration management of life cycle assets. With this release, it provides automated release management through an integration with IBM Rational ClearQuest and IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager.
  
• Java™-build auditing with ANT extends build auditing to Java developers and enhances traceability.
  
• Enhanced WAN access and large file support improve development flexibility
  

With Full UCM with ClearQuest support in the ClearCase Remote Client, and the Java ant build auditing, I think that ClearCase 7 will take us to the next level in Configuration Management. I look forward to assisting my clients with the migration, and finally answering the questions of “how can we use ClearCase to do remote and distributed development?”

My First Post with Microsoft Office Word 2007 Blogger

Twit This!

I just discovered today that Microsoft Word 2007 has a built-in ability to blog.

I have been looking (er. Waiting) for some tool that I already use to have that feature, as I don’t always feel like logging into a website to write my thoughts or comments. I want to be able to do all my writing offline, and then when I am ready publish. It’s the reason why we have VCR’s, PVR’s and microwaves… Lets do it when we want to.

I tried setting this up with a community server account, but I cant seem to get that working, so I went back to old faithful, Blogger.

So. This post is coming to you live from my new Word 2007 Beta 2 that I downloaded last week.

I love the new features for Outlook (layered multi-calendar is my first cool feature) and Powerpoint has a much cleaner look and feel. I am looking forward to really playing with the new InfoPath and hosting some forms in webs and Outlook, but I have a lot of cleaning up on my servers to be able to do that.

I love Beta testing, and will hopefully soon have put these tools through the paces so that I can develop some updated training packages to start training in the fall.

Well, next up is Blogging from OneNote 2007!