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Integrate teams, tools, applications, processes and knowledge with Zagile, JIRA and Confluence

Last Updated on Monday, 05 April 2010 21:52 Written by Zagile Monday, 05 April 2010 21:38

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zAgile offers the first applications to completely integrate your organization’s teams, tools, applications, processes, and knowledge, no matter what tools and applications are involved and no matter how distributed your teams are. No other solution offers the openness, flexibility, and power of zAgile products.

zAgile offers three products (features comparison table) to establish cohesion across your teams, tools, applications, processes, and knowledge:

• Wikidsmart: Open source semantic wiki engine for Confluence enterprise wiki
  
  
• zAgile Teamwork: Collaboration platform for software engineering
  
  
• zComposer: (Controlled release available. Contact   This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
  Methodology tool for capture, management, dissemination, and tracking of processes.

Wikidsmart makes your own wiki even smarter. Challenges present themselves when the wiki becomes more widely used throughout the enterprise. If users find that the wiki is too unstructured and unwieldy to use, the success of the wiki is threatened. That’s where Wikidsmart can help thanks to the innovative semantic repository and framework which forms the foundation of the solution.

Wikidsmart turns your wiki into a structured content repository, and with Connectors to other tools and applications, extends your reach to information throughout the organization. With Wikidsmart, you can capture content in forms (ensuring data entry consistency), integrate your wiki content with other systems and vice-versa (to remove manually creating and maintaining content updates), and turn your wiki into a knowledge repository, to intelligently query information across your various applications and tools.

Wikidsmart provides forms in your wiki to capture content in a structured and contextually integrated way. These forms are customizable and extensible, and they allow your users to be guided in how to enter content. In addition, since the information is captured in a structured way, the content may be easily queried in the future.  All of these capabilities allow your wiki to become a much more approachable data entry system and accessible knowledge repository. Read our blog about Wikidsmart for Confluence.

 

Wikidsmart enables you to create semantically enabled forms within your wiki

Add Connectors to Make Confluence an Enterprise Information Portal
Are your teams wasting valuable time on tedious, manual tasks of updating wiki information from other systems? Would you like forms in your wiki to automatically populate information into other systems? Would you like to automatically generate content, from other systems, into your wiki?  Wikidsmart enables all of these with Connectors that integrate your wiki with other tools and applications. Therefore, Wikidsmart may be extended to become an enterprise information portal to give your team a single point of view for the organization’s information.

Use Wikidsmart for the Business Domain of Your Choice
Wikidsmart is driven by semantic web ontologies which describe the artifacts, attributes, behaviors, and relationships for a given business domain. Ontologies are included for software engineering in Wikidsmart Professional Edition. For both Wikidsmart Professional Edition and Community Edition, you can plug in your own ontologies for a different business domain, or zAgile can provide custom-made ontologies for you, for example in healthcare, media, government, financial, or other domains.

Features

zAgile Wikidsmart includes the following features.

1. Capture content, in a consistent fashion, with forms. zAgile's infrastructure "recognizes" the content captured in these forms, and it organizes the content with respect to other semantically meaningful information for easy future retrieval and reference.
   
   
2. Find precise information quickly and easily by searching with respect to semantically meaningful topics. Therefore, you can find information in a contextual way within your wiki (e.g., zAgile can recognize "glasses" as "reading glasses" rather than "drinking glasses")
   
   
3. Automatically generate new pages based upon content captured in forms or from external applications that have zAgile Connectors
   
   
4. Sample knowledge model included for Personal Profile. This lets you manage for example a database of your employee resume information. Other knowledge models ("ontologies") can be augmented or substituted for a given domain as described in point 3 above.

zAgile Teamwork is a collaboration platform for for software engineering, and it includes zAgile Wikidsmart, the open source semantic wiki engine. zAgile Teamwork is an elegant solution to the age-old problem of disparate engineering teams, tools, and processes, and knowledge. Teamwork leverages the Atlassian Confluence enterprise wiki and the Atlassian JIRA issue tracker to deliver simple, yet powerful collaboration for software engineering, in a completely integrated and extensible environment. Teamwork supports Requirements and Test Case management via Confluence smart templates, and it seamlessly integrated with JIRA Projects, Tasks and Bugs. As everyone’s engineering environment is different, Teamwork also integrates with other tools that fit your needs, including those covering: Version Control, Continuous Build, Requirements Management, Issue Tracking, Test Case Management, Project Management, etc.

Features

zAgile Teamwork includes the following features.

1. Wikidsmart features:
   • Capture content, in a consistent fashion, with forms. zAgile's infrastructure "recognizes" the content captured in these forms, and it organizes the content with respect to other semantically meaningful information for easy future retrieval and reference.
   • Find precise information quickly and easily by searching with respect to semantically meaningful topics. Therefore, you can find information in a contextual way within your wiki (e.g., zAgile can recognize "glasses" as "reading glasses" rather than "drinking glasses")
   • Automatically generate new pages based upon content captured in forms or from external applications that have zAgile Connectors
   • Augment the software engineering knowledge model by importing "ontologies", knowledge models for specific domains that you may already have, build yourself, or have the zAgile services team build for you. For example, you could import a knowledge model for healthcare, financial, or other domains.
     
     
2. Software engineering knowledge model (“ontology”)
   
   
3. Wiki “smart templates”:  wiki forms for software engineering (e.g., Requirements, Test Cases, Projects, etc.)
   
   
4. JIRA Connector for deep bi-directional integration of information between Confluence and JIRA. For example, JIRA information can be easily exposed in Confluence with an embedded query, and likewise a customizable tab page called Properties in JIRA displays content from the wiki that takes into account the context of the current Project, Issue, or Task of interest.

This video lets you see how zAgile Teamwork lets you define Requirements and Test Cases in Confluence, and tightly integrate those with Project, Issue, and Task in JIRA.


Finally, A Wiki Application Tailored Specifically to Software Engineering

See an example of how Teamwork enables application interoperability, between Atlassian's Confluence wiki and JIRA issue tracker

Content may automatically linked with external systems. This example shows links automatically connected to JIRA

Teamwork's Cloud Portal

Are you an IT executive without a clear enterprise view of your team’s progress? Are you a team member looking for insight and more collaborative synergies with your peers?

For an unmatched view of your complete software life-cycle, Teamwork’s portal called zPortal (available only in the cloud version of Teamwork) integrates the repositories of your tools behind the scenes, while a portal technology of your choice, displays the real-time status of every aspect of your project. This is all made possible thanks to the innovative semantic repository and framework which forms the foundation of the solution. In addition, the solution adds structure to your Wiki, so it may become a true enterprise knowledge and content repository.

 

zPortal provides "Facebook-like" collaboration features for stakeholders and a dashboard for executives

Real-time collaboration tools and a dashboard of your integrated software engineering tools and environment enable your team to maximize synergies and eliminate manual synch-up tasks and slash your bloated meeting schedule.Front-end for your choice of portals such as JBoss, WebSphere, Liferay, or Microsoft Sharepoint.

zPortal can be used as a composite front-end for tools, to remove complexity for stakeholders who do not require feature-rich access. For example, this JBoss portlet front-end to Jira enables a professional services team to submit tasks into Jira with pre-set configurations for their team.

zComposer

zComposer gives you the power to efficiently scale up your engineering team with predictable results, no matter how distributed your worldwide team may be. Are you having trouble ensuring that your corporate methodology and processes are used across your organization? Is your offshore service provider following your organization’s methodology and processes? Are you looking for a way to easily disseminate your methodology and processes to every one of your organization’s tools and applications so that the methodology becomes part of your business processes rather than a Powerpoint or PDF collecting dust? zComposer gives you the power to capture and clearly express your organization’s methodology and processes, plus automatically publish it to your organizations tools, applications, and wiki, all at the click of a mouse.
See for yourself how zComposer can help.

Define your organizations Methodology within zComposer's Method Composer module

Make sure all your distributed teams are on the same page regarding processes, and enable highly efficient scale-up of distributed engineering teams. You can capture, manage, disseminate, and measure methodologies and processes. And ensure consistency across your software teams by automatically instantiating projects into your tools in a consistent and rich manner.

Once your methodology is captured, then you can instantiate projects into your tools' repositories using Project Configurator

 

• zCALM Semantic Framework
  zCALM (zAgile Cohesion for Application Life-cycle Management) is the semantic framework infrastructure that drives zAgile's semantic solutions for integrating information. It consists of a semantic access layer and an XML-RPC Server, and it can be used to semantically enable any application.
  
  
• Knowledge Models (Repository)
  The knowledge models are “ontologies” which drive the zAgile solution and provide the semantic meaning for a given domain such as software engineering, healthcare, or finance. For the open source Wikidsmart product, users may plug-in their own third-party ontologies (e.g., healthcare, financial, etc.) as well as request custom ontologies from zAgile. For the commercial zAgile products, these knowledge models are software engineering ontologies.

• Wiki extensions
  Wikidsmart plug-in which allow you to semantically enable your Wiki, i.e., allow your wiki to become a structured knowledge repository that can be easily searched in a context-sensitive manner, as well as integrate with other systems. Commercial products include customizable “Smart Templates” which are wiki forms specifically for software engineering, e.g., Requirements, Test Cases, Project, etc.

• Connectors
  JIRA Connector included in Teamwork. Other Connectors for other 3rd party tools and applications available from zAgile upon request.

• Portal
  A portal technology is included with the solution, or you can plug zAgile into your own JSR-168 compatible portal. Includes both native zAgile portlets for team-building as well as portlets for the tools of your environment.

• Methodology Composer
  A tool to easily capture your methodology.

• Project Configurator
  A tool to easily disseminate your methodology to applications and tools at the click of a button.
  structure