What's new in this release

New features continue to enhance the Rational® Connector for SAP Solution Manager.

With Rational Connector for SAP Solution Manager, businesses can integrate the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) features of SAP Solution Manager and the Rational solution for Collaborative Lifecycle Management. Utilizing industry standards, such as Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration, end-users can seamlessly optimize the deployment of their SAP and Rational projects.

OSLC is an HTTP-based protocol that uses unique URLs to identify data so that you can link to resources in other products. Linked data makes it possible to access data directly from another product. For an overview of OSLC and information about how to create and use OSLC-based integrations, see Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration integrations. For more information about the OSLC specifications, see Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration Community.

The IBM Rational Connector for SAP Solution Manager is a web application providing a communication layer between Rational tools and SAP’s Solution Manager product. It employs protocols jointly developed by IBM and SAP. Once an administrator has linked one or more Solution Manager and Rational tools projects, end users can begin by exporting SAP Solution Manager blueprints to create IBM Rational Quality Manager test plans and test cases as well as IBM Rational Requirements Composer requirements. Resulting requirements and test collections reside in a folder structure that mirrors the blueprint hierarchy found in SAP Solution Manager. Requirements link back to the blueprint requirements documents, providing a live view of the details of the blueprint business requirements. After testing is performed, results can be imported back into SAP Solution Manager for reporting and analysis.

As SAP packaged applications are deployed, problems which span the paired SAP and Rational development tools might need to be made visible in multiple environments. Using OSLC, the IBM Rational Connector for SAP Solution Manager allows you to create links between IBM Rational Team Concert work items and SAP Service Desk incidents. Problems can initially be created as an incident in SAP Service Desk or a work item in IBM Rational Team Concert with a corresponding work item or incident opened in the other tool and linked. Within IBM Rational Team Concert, an OSLC link to an incident provides a preview of the Service Desk incident when hovered over with the mouse. Clicking on that link takes you to the browser interface of Service Desk for the associated incident.

Also new in this release is support for SAP’s Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA). Using BPCA, you can determine which areas of a blueprint are affected by changes (such as customizations to a packaged application or the installation of a service pack). With the IBM Rational Connector for SAP Solution Manager, you can generate an IBM Rational Quality Manager test plan with an ordered set of test cases focused on the impacted areas of the change(s). Test plans can be optimized based on a number of criteria. This BPCA integration with the IBM Rational Connector for SAP Solution Manager and IBM Rational Quality Manager is the first of a kind integration for test management tools outside of SAP Solution Manager.


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