Enabling Global Configuration Management servers to contribute configurations to other Global Configuration Management servers

Attention: This feature is experimental and is not supported in production. If you wish to experiment with this feature, contact IBM Support to request information about how to enable it.

Some teams with isolated IBM® Engineering Lifecycle Management deployments need to collaborate on product assemblies across multiple lines of business. As an experiment in implementing this use case, you can configure a Global Configuration Management server to accept contributions from different Global Configuration Management servers. The contribution of a global configuration from one Global Configuration Management server to a global configuration on a different Global Configuration Management server is called an external contribution.

Before you begin

Configuring a Global Configuration Management server to accept contributions from different Global Configuration Management servers is an advanced feature with several constraints. Ensure that you understand the following Global Configuration Management concepts:

External contribution
The contribution of a global configuration from one Global Configuration Management server to a global configuration on a different Global Configuration Management server.
Contributing applications

Contributing applications are OSLC configuration providers that have the configuration management capability enabled for one or more of their project areas. For Engineering Lifecycle Management, the contributing applications include Global Configuration Management, IBM Engineering Workflow Management (Engineering Workflow Management or CCM), IBM Engineering Test Management (Engineering Test Management or QM), and IBM Engineering Requirements Management DOORS® Next (DOORS Next or RM).

Home Global Configuration Management server
The Global Configuration Management server that applications can contribute local configurations to.

The applications that can contribute local configurations to global configurations are Engineering Workflow Management, Engineering Test Management, and DOORS Next.

The domain-specific applications can contribute local configurations to only one Global Configuration Management instance, their home Global Configuration Management server. Jazz® Team Server indicates the home Global Configuration Management server in one of the following ways:
  • Explicitly by the value set in the Global Configuration Provider URL advanced server property.

    If the contributing applications are registered to a different Jazz Team Server than Global Configuration Management, you must specify the home Global Configuration Management server on the Jazz Team Server for those applications.

  • Implicitly by the Global Configuration Management instance that is registered to that Jazz Team Server.

    If all contributing applications are registered to the same Jazz Team Server as Global Configuration Management, that Global Configuration Management instance is automatically the home server, so you need not set the Global Configuration Provider URL property. Registering multiple Global Configuration Management instances to the same Jazz Team Server is not supported.

About this task

When to enable Global Configuration Management servers to contribute configurations to other Global Configuration Management servers.

If your organization needs to collaborate across lines of business and share global configurations, use this feature only if the following conditions are true:
  • You can't get the scalability or performance you need from a single Global Configuration Management instance, even if that instance runs on a more powerful system.
  • You are prepared to install and maintain Eclipse Amlen.
  • You are prepared to configure and maintain several project area associations: one for each current and potential project area that a Global Configuration Management instance interacts with across all deployments.
  • You can configure at least one instance of the Link Index Provider to accept feeds from all the Engineering Lifecycle Management applications in a deployment, including the other Global Configuration Management instances in the other deployments.
  • You can set up external contributions that meet the constraints.

If your organization needs more time to meet the conditions, you might consider setting up multiple project areas in a single Global Configuration Management instance to achieve similar control over contributions between servers. If your organization is ready to enable contributions between Global Configuration Management servers, ensure that you understand the prerequisites.

Important: After you enable external contributions for a Global Configuration Management server, disabling this feature is not supported.

Before you proceed with the steps, read the following topics carefully and ensure that you understand the feature, when to use it, its constraints, and the examples. Read the prerequisites first.