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 reviewers 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 in Rational Asset Manager.
- 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.