Tasktop Syncs With IBM Rational Team Concert 4.0

Tasktop Technologies, creator of Eclipse Mylyn and provider of application lifecycle management (ALM) integration solutions, has announced that its Tasktop Sync 2.5 provides full support for Rational Team Concert (RTC) 4.0.

Officials at Tasktop said the company provides the de facto industry standard for integrating increasingly heterogeneous ALM tool stacks with improved data and work flow across the enterprise. Rational Team Concert 4.0, a major new release of IBM’s ALM collaboration platform, is the latest tool Tasktop is supporting.

Deeper data integration

With improvements to RTC’s build, user interface and the web client functionality now available, Tasktop Sync provides deeper data integration and connects RTC to a growing number of tools, such as Atlassian’s JIRA, HP Quality Centre and Microsoft Team Foundation Server to improve enterprise development productivity and efficiency.

“Tasktop is committed to ensuring our customers receive the latest and greatest versions of our partners’ products as they are available, strengthening the Tasktop ecosystem,” Dave West, chief product officer for Tasktop, said in a statement. “IBM’s new release of Rational Team Concert has significant enhancements that are important to software development teams using a range of tools and products. Tasktop Sync continues to support both legacy and next-generation IBM Rational products, allowing customers to connect projects that use a variety of IBM Rational technology while supporting a flexible tool stack.”

Tasktop solves one of the biggest and fastest-growing challenges facing IT organisations that are implementing enterprise-wide Agile, ALM and cloud development initiatives – the proliferation of the heterogeneous developer tool stack, Tasktop officials said.

First, the Tasktop platform connects developers through its Tasktop Dev desktop synchronisation toolset. Second, it connects cross-functional enterprise teams with Tasktop Sync, its ALM integration platform that automates the entire application development lifecycle. Together, the solutions provide integration of tools, data, people and processes that are increasingly important within today’s fast-paced and complex enterprise IT organisations, the company said. With Tasktop, developers and managers have visibility into ALM workflow, real-time data sharing of cross-functional activities and context into actual performance and business value.

IBM partnership

IBM Rational has OEMed Tasktop Sync as part of Big Blue’s Lifecycle Integration Adapters. In a 27 November blog post, Mik Kersten, chief executive of Tasktop, shed a little light on his company’s partnership with IBM.

“Today the IBM Rational Lifecycle Integration Adapters Tasktop Edition appeared on the IBM price list,” Kersten said. “This OEM version of Tasktop Sync makes the technology broadly available to IBM clients using Rational Team Concert (RTC), who can now get all of the benefits of Tasktop Sync’s real-time and collaboration-centric ALM integration infrastructure. This helps IBM clients to successfully unify heterogeneous tooling environments with RTC capabilities.”

Tasktop aims to “connect the world of software delivery” by providing the cross-repository integration and infrastructure tools that “weave together” many Agile, enterprise and open-source ALM tools in today’s software delivery stack, Kersten wrote.

“To achieve this, Tasktop has been working very closely with the ALM community to help define the APIs and standards, such as Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) and W3C Linked Data, which form the boundaries of the software value chain within your organisation,” he wrote. “Integration has become the main bottleneck to connecting the software lifecycle, and Tasktop has emerged as the ‘Switzerland of ALM’, with Sync becoming the equivalent of an Enterprise Service Bus for artifacts of the software delivery process.”

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Originally published on eWeek.