Communities in Rational Asset Manager

A community is an environment in which users interact with a group of related assets. The assets in a community can have different types, categories, relationships, and review processes. To set different levels of access to the community, community administrators assign roles and permissions to users and user groups.

A community is the highest level of organization for assets and users in IBM® Rational® Asset Manager. It is the most fundamental way to group a collection of types of assets. Every asset, regardless of asset type, must be in a community.

A community is composed of users and their assigned roles and permissions, their assets, and the processes to review and govern assets. Community administrators manage assets, roles, privileges, and review processes to ensure that users can work with the repository effectively. For more information about the role of community administrators, see Community administrators.

What communities control

Because all assets are in a community, communities control the following aspects of the repository:

Roles for users and user groups: A role is a collection of permissions for a community that administrators assign to users or user groups. For example, with the built-in Asset creator role, a user can find, download, and create assets. Individual users can have multiple roles, and they can have different roles in different communities. For more information about roles, see Roles and permissions.

Roles of individual users: After you have configured the appropriate roles for users in your community, you can assign those roles to individual users of the repository.

Roles of generic users: You can assign roles for your community to two generic groups:

All users: You can use this group to assign a role to everyone who uses the Web client, whether they have signed in. For example, you might want to allow everyone to view search results for assets in your community.
Signed-in users: You can use the Signed-in users group to assign a role to any user who has signed in to the repository.

User groups and roles for groups: Instead of individually assigning the same role to many users, you can place users into a user group and assign a role to the group. For example, you might create the Asset reviewers group. All members of a user group have the same role. A user can belong to multiple user groups in the same community. If you are using LDAP authentication, you can generate a user group dynamically from an LDAP group.

Asset types and categories that are only for assets in the community: All communities can use the asset types and category schemas that are defined for the entire repository. In addition, community administrators can modify asset types and categories or create asset types and category schemas that are available only for assets in that community. For more information about creating community-specific asset types or categories, see Creating community asset types and Creating community category schemas.

Lifecycles for managing and governing asset development: You can use lifecycles to manage the review process of assets. With lifecycles, you define lifecycle managers and collaborators for various stages of asset development, such as Draft or Approved. You can also define policies, with which you can test various conditions to govern assets. For example, you can allow an asset to be Approved only if it has a certain type of artifact. For more information, see Creating custom lifecycle processes and Policies for lifecycles.

Integrations with external tools: You can extend the capability of the product by connecting a community to the following tools:

IBM Jazz servers, such as IBM Rational Team Concert or IBM Rational Requirements Composer: With a connection to a Jazz server, you can add links to resources on the server, such as defects or enhancements through forums in the Rational Asset Manager community. You can also add links to resources on the Jazz server as attributes for asset types. For example, for a Release type asset, you can link to Plan item resources on a Rational Team Concert server that is tracking enhancements for the current release.
Change management servers, such as IBM Rational ClearQuest®: With a connection to a change management server, all members of a community can report a problem about an asset by using the Rational Asset Manager forums. For more information, see Integrating with Rational ClearQuest.
IBM WebSphere® Service Registry and Repository: With a connection to WebSphere Service Registry and Repository (WSRR), you can use publish assets with Web services artifacts or other business objects to WSRR. You can also create records called remote assets in Rational Asset Manager for certain objects in WSRR. You can manage this process dynamically with lifecycles. For more information, see Integrating with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository.
IBM Tivoli® Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB): You can use Rational Asset Manager to store software or media assets as part of a definitive library in CCMDB.

When to create communities

You might want to create communities for the following reasons:

To match the organizational structure of your company: Each department in your company might have their own community and requirements for assets on the repository.
To better manage the growth of your repository: When you use roles and permissions in communities to limit the number of assets that users can find and use, the repository becomes more usable.
To manage an individual project: You might create a community that is based on a single project, which would consist of all the assets and users for the project.
To group users who have common roles and common needs for reusable assets: Instead of creating communities that match your organizational structure, you might create communities to group users who are in different departments but who have similar roles. For example, you might create a community for all software developers in all departments so that they can easily communicate and share reusable assets.

When not to create a community

Before you create a community, be sure that you have the resources to administer it. The ongoing administrative costs of assigning roles, creating and managing lifecycles for assets, and creating custom asset types and categories for each community can be a burden.