CCIUG history
Introduction
This page gives a historical overview the CCIUG and the corresponding Discussion forum.
Content
The CCIUG forum, or the ClearCase forum
as it is called on developerWorks, is the oldest Rational discussion forum. CCIUG stands for ClearCase International User Group. It originally started in the 90ies of last century as a mailing list. Thousands of users were connected and it was a very active user community. The competence and performs often even exceeded the official channel of Rational Technical Support. Messages posted on the CCIUG mailing list were archived and made available on a web-site for reference and browsing.
Around 2000, the CCIUG mailing list was replaced by the Rational Developer Network (RDN) at www.rational.net, where also discussion forums for other Rational products were hosted. RDN introduced a web-based interface to the discussion forum, also supporting mailing list functionality. In 2003, Rational started to facilitate building a real user community, a social network of users. At the Rational User Conference 2003, the Discussion Facilitator group was initiated.
When IBM acquired Rational in 2003/2004, the RDN facilities were replaced by IBM infrastructure. This architecture had no mailing list functionality, the web-interface was not performing properly and the old RDN discussion threads and the archived CCIUG mailing list threads were no longer available properly. The ClearCase user community had an enormous set back, where the message traffic was reduced to less than 10% of its original volume. The CCIUG community suffered dearly by the lack of its precious CCIUG mailing list/discussion forum.
However, thanks to the persistent efforts from the RDN team, now also being part of IBM and the volunteering Discussion Facilitators from the user community, the discussion forum facilities were improved, mailing list functionality was added again and slowly the CCIUG user community was regaining its strength. Yet, until today it has not reached its original vitality. Partly, this is also due to dip in product quality of ClearCase as the result of the transfer from Rational to IBM.
Currently, the traffic volume on the ClearCase discussion forum has again reached the level of 100 to 150 messages per day, which is a mix of web-based and mailing based postings. In spite of its setback it is still the busiest discussion forum of the IBM Rational developerWorks discussion forums. The Discussion Facilitator team still exists and is still working to improve the community feeling among users and to improve the communication with IBM Rational's product management.
See also
