Rational Team Webtop

IBM® Rational® Team Webtop™ provides a Configurable Collaborative Environment that extends your data by giving you composite views across disparate applications.

If you have adopted multiple IBM Rational software solutions, IBM Rational Team Webtop is a development mashup server that can give you a configurable collaborative environment with composite views of the data stored in separate tool repositories.

• View and edit data, as well as traceability and attribute information, from disparate tools within a single Web browser
• Communicate with your teammates and customers with integrated change management and discussion threads
• Use standard Internet Explorer® and Firefox® Web browsers for client access
• Launch power clients in the right context when needed
• Help ensure clients are all on the latest version via server-side-only updates
• Reduce training needs through intuitive, consistent user interface
• Promote best practices from EPF and RMC based processes such as IBM® Rational® Harmony™

View features and benefits

Team productivity is often hampered by the islands of information that are created by powerful, yet disconnected, tools. While these products can be ideal for individual team members, they can fragment workflow and impair productivity.

IBM® Rational® Team Webtop™ provides a better way to work. This unique software product offers composite views of information drawn from the discipline-based tools used across the project lifecycle for change management, modeling and requirements management. The Rational Team Webtop server can leverage your existing tool investments and infrastructure and adds the capability of mashing up data from disparate repositories.

Composite views of disparate tools via a new integration architecture
While individual tools provide comprehensive desktop clients and occasional Web-based access, their scope is limited to the data stored in the individual tool. Data from other tools can only be accessed through brittle, error-prone point-to-point integrations and data replication.

Rational Team Webtop offers a better way to collaborate by leveraging a new integration architecture. Team Webtop leaves the data in its native repository and makes it accessible via a tool-specific Web widget that enables you to view and manipulate the data through Team Webtop.

All of the widgets are hosted together in a collaborative Web-based environment. As a result, Team Webtop provides a flexible and rich experience with a consistent user interface and single sign-on. This unique approach promotes relationships and collaboration across disciplines and data sources because users simply drag and drop information or create traceability across widgets to view and edit data and to participate in threaded discussions.

Find the information you need when you need it
To make it easy for you to find your way through the myriad artifacts that comprise your project, Rational Team Webtop provides a browser that shows all the artifacts relevant to your project in a single interface; even though, they may actually be stored in multiple tools. A ‘breadcrumb trail’ and recent documents/favorites list help you get to the right information quickly. Collaboration with your team and customers is greatly enhanced by an integrated work items list and discussion thread. Integrated Eclipse Process Framework and IBM Rational Method Composer (RMC) based processes such as IBM Rational Harmony™ give you access to best practices when and where you need it.

With Team Webtop, you access information from individual tools through widgets, which are small self-contained applications that snap into the Team Webtop environment. You choose which widgets to use and how you will organization them in your personalized Team Webtop environment.

Team Webtop widgets are currently available for IBM® Rational® Change™, IBM Rational DOORS® and IBM Rational Tau®. To create comprehensive, flexible environment, more widgets are currently under development.

IBM Rational Change Widget for Rational Team Webtop
With the Rational Change Widget, you can submit new work items such as change requests or enhancement requests; view which work items you have been assigned; establish and traverse links between work items and other artifacts; and change the status, as well as edit the details of the work item.

IBM Rational DOORS Widget for Rational Team Webtop
With the Rational DOORS Widget, you can view and edit requirements from your central DOORS repository. You can access requirement descriptions, including rich text, OLE objects, and tables, as well as requirements attributes and traceability links.

IBM Rational Tau Widget for Rational Team Webtop
With the Telelogic Tau Widget, you can view multiple UML models at the same time, view individual model element properties, and raise change requests and discussion threats against model elements.

How it works
Team Webtop uses rich Internet application (RIA) technologies to deliver a ‘zero-install’ client that runs within Microsoft Internet Explorer® and Mozilla Firefox® Web browsers. Team Webtop server components are deployed in a multi-tier architecture providing scalable access through an application.