As 2007 draws to a close, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the year and thank all of the Global Rational Community members for your active participation throughout the year.

Help us keep this momentum in 2008 by participating in your local UG activities, community webcasts, surveys, polls and other community events.

RUG Call for Content!

Share your own tips and tricks, great ideas, or articles with the global community! We are dedicating this section of our newsletter to include content authored by YOU! Please contact us at info@rational-ug.org to share your content.

GRUG Council Member Highlight

Douglas Klugh, Assistant Vice President of Wells Fargo Bank and IBM Rational Consultant, is delivering risk management solutions to ensure the bank's compliance with federal and state regulations. These solutions include development of software systems utilizing Rational tools and associated software engineering best practices. His expertise in software engineering includes utilization of Rational tools such as RUP, RSA, RSM, RequisitePro, Method Composer, ClearCase, ClearQuest, and Rose. With industry experience in insurance, investments, and banking, Doug has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in providing iterative software processes, business process models, requirements authoring and management, design and implementation of object-oriented and service-oriented architectures, administration of software configuration and change management, business intelligence solutions, and enterprise data services. As Vice President of the Global Rational Users Group, he is promoting collaboration of local user groups around the world. While living in Scottsdale, Arizona, Doug helped to establish the Arizona Rational Users Group and led that group to become one of the largest RUGs in the United States.

Rational User Group Community Statistics:

RUG Community Membership: 13,200
RUG Active User Group: 86
RUG Newsletter Subscribers: 8,700

UG News
DFW Metroplex
Formerly known as the Dallas RUG, the DFW Metroplex RUG has been re-activated by Phil Bardasian who has recently moved into the area. Since Phil took over, he has already been able to add over 20 new members. Phil is planning a meeting in January, 2008. Please help him by joining the group and attending the meeting if you are in the area.

Global Rational Community Member Survey

Please help us find out more on how you use Rational products by participating in our monthly surveys. This month's survey deals with Enterprise Project Management.

Ready for IBM Rational software Comes to You Webinar Series

The series has concluded for 2007. We are planning new events for 2008. In the meantime, the archives of the recent webinars hosted by the GRC are now available at:

http://www.rational-ug.org/webcast.php

Enterprise IT and modernization for flexibility

From The Mainstream e-newsletter: Dr. Daniel Sabbah, General Manager of IBM Rational Software, discusses how the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform unifies IT development communities to address their challenges.

New IBM Security Scanning Software Protects Businesses From Hackers

IBM today introduced new software to help customers protect their business from today's most advanced and complex web application security attacks.

IBM Helps Clients Modernize Applications on the Mainframe

IBM today announced new software to help companies around the world modernize their IT environments.

Latest Rational Support topics of interest

This is a compilation of news, updates and coming events as well as self-help tools and resources that are available on IBM.com.

RSDC: Call for Papers

The deadline has been extended to Dec. 17th.

IBM Rational Performance Tester helps USOpen.org serve millions of visitors confidently

"Using Rational Performance Tester, our webmaster quickly and easily configured a browsing workload and search workload, and used them to generate nearly 25,000 hits per minute to a single node. We verified the end-to-end performance of USOpen.org prior to the tournament and the site performed flawlessly throughout. Even though we had more than 7 million unique visitors, we never got close to the traffic to a single node that Rational Performance Tester was able to generate." - John Kent, IBM Program Manager Worldwide Sponsorship Marketing

Swisscard slashes costs and resource use when it taps IBM to automate its application processing service using IBM Rational software

"We are processing new customer applications at an unprecedented rate, thanks to IBM Rational software automation." - -Martin Wettstein, CIO, Swisscard AECS AG

HostBridge uses IBM products to integrate CICS applications as Web services

"IBM collaborated with us to develop tight integration between Rational Developer for System z and HostBridge. Joint development efforts like this demonstrate the strong support for IBM Business Partners who provide unique value to System z customers." - Michael Wilson, vice president, marketing, HostBridge Technology, LLC

DONG Energy: Making the most of the intelligent electrical grid

"It turns out that the real key isn't the fact that we've got visibility into the grid, though that was our initial goal. It's that we now have information available on grid performance that we didn't have before. We can do a lot with that information." - Peter Vinter, power grid specialist, DONG Energy

Travis County Tax Office develops a new way to vote and access other key government services.

Making it easy for people to register to vote is a challenge facing communities around the world. Through a major transformation, citizens of Travis County can now register in just minutes via the Web.

Do you have a presentation to share with the community on how to implement Rational software? Post it on the Presentation Zone!

A list of recent presentations:

When Requirements go Wrong! (Requirements Errors) - Submitted by Glenn Stout of Chicagoland Rational User Group

IBM Software Support - Passport Advantage - Submitted by Ed Steele of Omaha Rational User's Group

Model Driven Development & Model Driven Architecture Overview - Submitted by Ed Steele of Omaha Rational User's Group

Rational 'Talks to You' Teleconference Series
Starts on Nov. 14th

SHARE Conference - Focus on SOA and Virtualization
February 24-29, 2008
Lake Buena Vista, FL

IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2008
June 1-5, 2008
Orlando, FL

Service Oriented Builds for Service Oriented Architectures
11 Dec 2007

Application Development Tools for the Mainframe Developer
12 Dec 2007

Business Intelligence for your Software Assets
13 Dec 2007

Podcasts
Looking at Rational Build Forge Express Edition
Sundeep Goel, Worldwide Channel Sales with IBM® Rational®, talks about the development need that Rational Build Forge® Express Edition is designed to address. He talks about what to expect in implementation, the strengths of the Build Forge product set, and where Express Edition fits into the picture.

Build and release best practices
Sundeep Goel, Worldwide Channel Sales with IBM® Rational®, talks about principles around build and release best practices including software reproducibility, decoupling process from hardware, and building early and often. He then shares some real world scenarios.

Rational Team Concert and Jazz
Kartik Kanakasabesan, Product Manager for Rational Team Concert, talks about the first offering on the Jazz platform. He discusses the development environment Rational Team Concert is designed for, and looks at some of the challenges Rational Team Concert is intended to address. Scenarios, the open commercial development model, and support for Visual Studio .Net customers are also discussed.

Trial Downloads

Try IBM Rational Asset Manager V7.0 online!
You can now evaluate IBM Rational Asset Manager V7.0 online without installing or configuring it on your own system! Rational Asset Manager helps create, modify, govern, find, and reuse any type of development assets, including SOA and systems development assets. Rational Asset Manager helps you reduce software development costs and improve quality by facilitating the reuse of all types of software development-related assets. Visit developerWorks to learn more about this product and register to explore its capabilities online.

Try the IBM SOA Sandbox for Connectivity
Visit IBM developerWorks to try the IBM SOA Sandbox for connectivity. The SOA Sandbox for connectivity provides a trial environment with the tooling and components to help you explore how to effectively connect your infrastructure and integrate all of the people, processes and information in your company. Use the hosted sandbox to explore SOA techniques that streamline connecting existing IT assets together, as well as learn how to connect them to new business logic.

Don't wait! Try the Rational Application Developer (RAD) v7.5 open beta code today
Download the Rational Application Developer (RAD) v7.5 open beta code and start developing applications for the JEE5 standard which features EJB3.0, JPA, JSF 1.2, JSP 2.1 and Servlet 2.5 standards. When you use this beta you will see how you can increase developer productivity for already existing applications with improved support for refactoring, as well as adding new features to existing applications. In addition, the beta provides tooling for JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP, Siebel and PeopleSoft to improve the developer productivity with these enterprise systems.

Demos

Understand the workbench environment, Part 1

Understand the workbench environment, Part 2

Understand the workbench environment, Part 3

Understand the workbench environment, Part 4

Build and deploy tracking records in IBM Rational ClearQuest, Part 1
This demo is the first of a two part series that demonstrates how IBM® Rational® ClearQuest allows you to create and enforce a repeatable process for building and deploying applications. In Part 1, you'll see how to define a release, define roles for that release and create an approval process.

Build and deploy tracking records in IBM Rational ClearQuest, Part 2
This demo is the second of a two part series that demonstrates how IBM® Rational® ClearQuest allows you to create and enforce a repeatable process for building and deploying applications. Part 2 walks you though creating different testing environments, such as system test and integration test. It finishes with the creation of a build record. This build record can be used to track information about your build though your deployment lifecycle.

Enabling software delivery excellence for small and midsized businesses
This demonstration gives you an overview of IBM® Rational® Build Forge Express Edition, a global offering that provides a framework to automate and execute software processes. Rational Build Forge provides a software assembly line that can support all of your tools, technologies, and platforms so you can achieve a repeatable, reliable, and traceable build and release process.

Architecture, design, and construction using the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform- Part 5: Transformations

Architecture, design, and construction using the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform- Part 6: AJAX

Architecture, design, and construction using the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform- Part 7: Web services

Architecture, design, and construction using the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform- Part 8: Java modeling

Architecture, design, and construction using the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform- Part 9: Reverse transformation

eKits

Did you say mainframe?
Learn how you can extend modern application lifecycle management to IBM System z through the IBM Rational Software Delivery Platform (SDP). The Did you say mainframe? e-kit includes podcasts, webcasts, tutorials, white and red papers, demos, and articles designed to help ease the challenges of modernizing your enterprise. This complimentary kit for mainframe developers is a practical, how-to guide for making the most of an existing development environment, including the skills and infrastructure already in place at an established enterprise.

Rational Asset Manager eKit
Learn how to do more with your reusable assets with the free Rational Asset Manager eKit. The eKit includes demos on how Rational Asset Manager tracks and audits your assets in order to utilize them for reuse. Plus you'll find white papers and a Webcast that discuss the challenges of a Service Oriented Architecture and how Rational Asset Manager can provide quick and effective solutions.

Special Offers

Free Rational Unified Process Poster
Get your Free Rational Unified Process Poster: Request a complimentary RUP poster with an IBM Rational software brand value CD while supplies last. IBM Rational Unified Process®, RUP®, provides proven best practices for software and systems delivery, implementation and effective project management.

ClearQuest Buy two get one free Promotion
Customers who purchase two (2) Rational ClearQuest Authorized Licenses (D53NSLL) OR two (2) Rational ClearQuest Floating Licenses (D531LLL) are eligible to receive one (1) additional Rational ClearQuest License at no additional charge. Limit three (3) additional no-charge license per customer (PA or PAX site number).

IBM Press -- Be Sure You're Taking Advantage of Special 40% User Group Discount!

The Global Rational User Group Community's special partnership with IBM Press entitles Rational members to 35% discounts on all IBM Press books (as well as additional select software titles from Pearson's Addison-Wesley Professional and Prentice Hall Professional imprints). Once logged in, click on "Member Benefits" and proceed to the IBM Press link. New featured releases include:

New Title: "Reaching The Goal: How Managers Improve a Services Business Using Goldratt's Theory of Constraints", authored by John A. Ricketts. Ricketts draws on Eli Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC), adapting it to the needs of today's professional, scientific, and technical services businesses.

Score More Savings from IBM
For a limited time, purchase $25,000 worth of training in an IBM Education Pack - online account, and in addition to your automatic 10 percent savings you'll also receive $2,000 in bonus training dollars. That's $27,000 worth of IBM training for just $22,500 - $4,500 in extra training dollars! Purchase $50,000 in your online account, and in addition to your automatic savings of $5,000, you'll receive $5,000 more in bonus training dollars. That's $10,000 in extra training dollars! You may use the IBM Education Pack - online account, to pay for your Rational software, and other, training needs.

Now Available - Fall 2007 IBM Training eCatalog
Keeping technical skills up-to-date with constantly changing technology can be a challenge. But not anymore. Announcing the 2007 Fall IBM Training eCatalog. The catalog features 183 new courses, 25 updated courses and 25 technical conferences encompassing 29 curriculum areas covering hardware and software topics, including Rational software. You can also request a print copy of the catalog.

IBM Rational Instructor-Led Online (ILO) courses
Get the education you need on Rational tools right from your desk and be part of a virtual classroom! Rational Education now offers Instructor-Led Online courses, which are synchronous classes with live instructor interactions, hands-on labs, and group interactions. ILO provides you with an alternative to traveling to a physical classroom location by training you in your own learning environment. ILO training also benefits those who need to train teams that are geographically dispersed allowing you to complete training locally in your own environment, and reduces the need for travel to a classroom.

ProObject Training is an IBM Premier Partner certified to conduct the full line of Rational training. ProObject Training offers a variety of courses including Ration Rose Real Time using C++, and the full line of ClearQwest products.

Our training facility, equipped with state-of-the-art computer workstations, is located in Hanover, MD just a few miles from the Baltimore Washington International (BWI) airport.