Rational Team Concert Shell integration for Windows Explorer

So many times in my Jazz Jumpstart team member life I got this question from our customers:

“Do you provide an integration of your Source Control Manager with Windows Explorer like Subversion does with TortoiseSVN?”

Each time, I had to reply: “No, for now. Please subscribe to the Story 43272: Windows Explorer client for simple SCM operations (like ClearCase, Tortoise, etc.) for non-eclipse users…”

Today we can say that RTC 4.0 will (certainly) provide a shell integration for Windows Explorer!

I checked the story: it has been created in February 2008 (yes, great feature might take some time, sometimes!) by one of my first customers (and friend!) Roman Smirak and it has so far 103 subscribers…

Please check-out the great article from Sreerupa Sen: Introducing the Rational Team Concert Shell integration for Windows Explorer and you will learn what you can expect from this great feature.

Roman! They built it!!! 😉

When Maven meets Rational Team Concert…

Regularly, the Jumpstart team members are invited to assist customers who either decided to adopt Rational Team Concert (RTC) and need to adapt their Maven build and deployment process to RTC or, as an “open source shop” wants to challenge RTC on this subject.

So, I would like to share with you some recommendations which helped our customers  in dealing with Maven when it meets RTC…

Maven-RTC integration: first impression

Generally, the customer first impression, when we show the Maven/RTC integration, is pretty good. Actually, RTC-Maven integration is straight forward (cf: Jazz-Wiki: A Jazz-based Maven build); once the user has chosen to create a Build Definition using the Maven Build template, he needs to specify: in which folder is stored the pom.xml (Project location) and which Maven goals to reach during the build. That’s it!

Unfortunately, this is not always so easy… Each customer I have met has had some particularities that I would like to share in his post.

The Jazz Jumpstart team

I recall when Paul Vanderlei invited me to join his new team, the first thing I did after his call was to google for Jumpstart.

You can imagine, as a French native speaker,  my surprise when I discovered that a “Jumpstart” is this device that helps you start a car.

Since that time I understood what the Jazz project was expecting from our team: provide this (minimal) amount of energy which can help close a deal or deploy a Jazz workbench in a customer environment.

Most of the Jumpstart team engagements are specific, so I would like to use this blog to gather some interesting points I learned with and/or I taught to my customers when they are suing a Jazz workbench like Rational Team Concert.

Your feedbacks are very welcome. I will do my best to take them under consideration.