Jazz 2.0 release candidate

RC1 for Rational Team Concert (RTC) 2.0 was released yesterday. Even though it’s only been a year since the 1.0 release, RTC got a lot of updates. First of all, there is now an Enterprise edition, which allows an unlimited amount of developers on a single server instance, a big improvement for large organizations with more than 250 developers. Cross-server and cross-project linking has been improved and formalized, one of the user-visible capabilities is that you can now create dashboards that contain information of several projects. This allows several interesting scenarios, such as a “Project of Projects” for a Project Office in a large orginization, or different companies with their own ALM deployments working together through the shared Jazz link.

All of the core components got some serious updates, but the Agile Planning Tool got the best screenshots. First, a new Standard-only feature calculates risk in the schedule based on the estimates and the planned dates:

Another fantastic feature, available in all RTC editions, is the “taskboard” view mode. This basically gives you a Scrum-sticky notes overview of the tasks. It looks really great on my big widescreen monitor at home:

There are a lot more new features, check out the new & noteworthy notes if you are interested. It’s not just brand new features though, in the different RTC “editions” (free, small, org, huge), a lot of the checkmarks got to the left side. This means the Express versions now are a much improved option for a quick single-project off-the-shelf solution. If you haven’t given RTC 2.0 some attention yet, be sure to take a look!