Blogging Roller

While reading the feeds the other day, I was delighted to see that the USDA IT department offers support for Apache Roller within the agency, below are the options. Wordpress MU is also supported.

Enterprise Solutions (NITC): Software As A Service

NITC offers a full service Blogging software service that can provide enhanced internal and external communication among management, operational and business staff, and the public. When this service is integrated into a web application, posted information is shared in a chronological fashion that delivers a high level of feedback and end-user interaction.

  What's Included

• Apache Roller Weblog™ or Wordpress MU™ software
• Apache Roller Weblog
  - Multi-node, highly available architecture
  - Production and non-Production environment
  - USDA eAuthentication protection available
  - Customizable “theme” packs, including standard USDA templates
  - User Accounts for site administration / content authoring
• Wordpress MU™
  - Multi-node highly available solution
  - Production and non-Production environment
  - Optional “add-ons” to add additional functionality to blogs
  - Customizable CSS-based themes
  - RSS Feeds

This sounds cool. I'd love love to see the slides or better yet, a sceen-cast.

Distributed Planning Poker
Integrating Google Wave and Rational Team Concert for collaborative effort estimation

Collaborative estimation and planning is a key concept for all agile development process frameworks. We will present a solution for playing "Planning Poker" that enables distributed development teams to estimate the effort of work items and build consensus in a collaborative way.

The prototype uses Google Wave as a collaboration platform and OSLC (http://www.open-services.net) for seamless integration with the developer IDE and work environment. We will show a demo on how a distributed team can estimate user stories and tasks from a product backlog in a collaborative way, and instantly use the results as the base for further sprint planning.

Additionally, attendees will learn some basic concepts and features about Google Wave, OSLC and IBM Rational Team Concert.

Mainsoft's Team Concert to Lotus Connections integration is getting better and better. I know this because I spent about 12 hours last week offering demos of the product at Innovate 2010. The except below is from a blog post on Jazz.net about the newest preview release. You can try it now. There's a download link at the end of the post and, like Team Concert, it's nice and easy to install and configure.

Build a Community around Your Project

Growing a social network around a software project brings developers up to speed faster. New hires and teams that are added to a core team will find all the information they need in a central Lotus Connections community, including blogs, forums, wikis, file repositories, and bookmarks. These collaboration systems offer a broad teamwork base for any software project. For example, wikis can hold product specifications, blogs can be used to publish roadmaps to a wider audience, forums can be used to gather feedback from beta testers, and a file repository hosts nightly builds with download statistics and commentary features.

Creating a new Lotus Connections community, or linking to an existing one, only takes a couple of clicks.  The administrator sets the Lotus Connections community in the Social Network tab under project management.

Once the project community is created, all project members are added to it and as new developers join the project, they automatically become members of the project community.

From my point-of-view, this was the big news from Innovate 2010: integration, linking and process automation across the software lifecycle from requirements, dev, build and test -- based on open interfaces defined by OSLC:

Dave Thomson: Why is this important?  The activities involving requirements, development, build and test are not process silos.  Integrating these disciplines through process automation, links between artifacts, and reporting across these links improves the productivity of teams while also improving the quality of the deliverables from those teams.

To focus this effort, we’re bringing Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, and a new requirements management product tentatively named “Rational DOORS Requirements Professional” more closely together and calling this set of products the Rational Workbench for Collaborative Lifecycle Management.

What’s a “workbench”? A Workbench is a term we use to describe a combination of products, services, and best practices that are designed to work well together to solve a particular problem.