Kovair has just published a document on implementing a Complex Integration Use Case using Kovair Omnibus. If your company is considering implementing a complex integration use case comprising both link based and synchronization based integration of data between cross vendor ALM tools, then this document will be of great value to you. It can be easily downloaded from our web site. We suggest that you read the article on IT service management strategy. We would appreciate any feedback that you send us.
10
Jun 2013
Implementing a Complex Integration Use Case using Kovair Omnibus
10
Jun 2013
Kovair at IBM Innovate 2013
Dear Friends of Kovair, as in 2012, Kovair participated in the Annual IBM Innovate 2013 Conference and Show at Orlando, Florida June 3 to 5, 2013 with a presence of three of us. 
There were exciting guest speakers at this year’s Innovate, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and The Lean Startup author Eric Ries. The focus was on major trends revolutionizing system and software delivery across the DevOps lifecycle: Cloud, Mobile, Social, Big Data, Smarter products, Agility, and Analytics. In an opening keynote for the event, Kristof Kloeckner, general manager of IBM Rational Software, said integrated approach to software delivery that integrates an organization’s culture, processes and tools spanning the entire lifecycle, from business planning and creation to delivery and feedback is critical.
We believe in this philosophy and had our own three significant events that are continuing to enhance Kovair’s partnership with IBM Rational with its JAZZ Platform for the ALM Tools and Kovair’s OSLC and Omnibus Integration Technologies. Kovair has just successfully completed its “Ready for Rational” – RFR Certification from IBM for the Integration Adapter for the Rational Team Concert – RTC. 
This now allows all the users of Rational Team Concert and related IBM JAZZ Platform tools to integrate with the Kovair Omnibus- both through OSLC “linking” and Omnibus “Syncing” with 40 other Kovair ALM and ITSM Integration Adapters for Tools from third party vendors. Second, on a new Innovation front in conjunction with IBM, Kovair has developed a “Tracked Resource Set-TRS” Provider that publishes all artifacts and their events from the tools connected to Kovair to the TRS Consumers like Rational Engineering Lifecycle Manager (RELM) and Lifecycle Query Engine – LQE. This makes possible the generation of real time graphs and reports inside IBM RELM from data coming across from different cross vendor tools connected through the Kovair Omnibus. A live demonstration of this capability was shown at Innovate 2013 in the IBM Integrations Section of the Show. Third, Kovair’s Director for the Omnibus Development, Puranjoy Chatterjee was included in an industry panel discussion on “Integrating with OSLC: Common Problems and Solutions Roundtable” Other companies on this panel included IBM, Ericsson, Mentor Graphics, Fujitsu Limited and Tasktop Technologies.
We had a great conference with conference attendees showing considerable interest on the part of the prospects to adopt these new technologies that are creating a very synchronized and unified product development environment for engineering teams spread globally and facilitate real time collaboration and significant productivity and quality gains. We continue to pursue our goal to enhance your development environment without asking you to replace any point tools from Kovair.
07
Jun 2013
The Thin Line between Reports and Dashboards
Almost all ALM tools provide you with the provision of collecting information and presenting them in various ways. Both Reports and Dashboards are used to serve a similar purpose of presenting the gathered information. However it has been observed that plenty of users are not well versed with when to use a dashboard versus a report?
The usage of Reports and Dashboards in a proper way and in the right context can lead you to guarantying success in a particular project. Thus it is extremely essential for users of a tool to have a fundamental knowledge about the difference of a report and dashboard and their usage. Kovair allows you to design and create different kinds of reports and dashboards according to your needs. We have recently uploaded a detailed document on our website, regarding the differences between reports and dashboards. The document also highlights the ease of use aspect of Kovair pertaining to reports and dashboards. If you are interested to learn more, we suggest that you read the Differences between Reports and Dashboards article.
19
Apr 2013
Extended Browser Support
It’s not easy to expand browser compatibility and bring in new features at the same time. Kovair has achieved this feat with its latest release — Kovair 7.0 — that boasts of several Web2.0 features and supports the widely used Web browsers: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Kovair 7.0 has been fully tested on Chrome 26, Firefox 10, IE 8, and IE 9; and experimental data has suggested that the application performs best on Chrome, followed by Firefox and IE. Though the result has endorsed our decision to welcome Chrome aboard, we are always aware that what really matters is what our customers are using, and thus we are striving to ensure that Kovair performs equally well on all supported browsers. Our objective is to keep pace with the rapidly changing Web world and yet ensure that our existing customers are not deprived of the new functionalities added to Kovair.
While popular browsers like IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari make up 98% of the Internet market share, there are a multitude of other browsers that are being used every day. As long as multiple browsers are in existence, Web based applications like Kovair will continue to face the challenges of browser compatibility. With the extended support for Chrome in Kovair 7.0, Kovair has made an attempt to improve its browser compatibility and reach a wider section of customers. Hopefully, customers will appreciate the intent.
04
Mar 2013
Blog Post for Kovair Videos
As I write this from Frankfurt airport on my way to Hannover, Germany where Kovair is participating for the first time at the major annual event called CeBIT where our booth will be in Hall 6, I am going to share with all of you something that our engineers have done recently – that we have not done very well in the past – the creation of several product focused videos. We used to wonder about some of the competitors posting several short videos on their websites that we were failing to do! That is no more the case. The following brief descriptions along with the URL links for each one of these new six videos on our website will provide something of interest to most of you from the Kovair product line for Application Lifecycle Management including the Agile Solution as well as IT Service Management and glimpses of our recent Release 7.0 with a Web 2.0 look and feel UI.
Each of the following heading is followed by a brief description of the content highlights for the video followed by the link for that specific video so that you can click on the videos of your interest and see them right out of this blog. So, please help yourselves and do not be reluctant to provide us the feedback – good bad or ugly – so that we can continue to do better.
Release 7.0 New User Interface
Powerful features made easy to use!
- Application tabs eliminate extra logins as in prior releases.
- A collapsible menu and header give more screen real estate; especially for laptop users
- Web 2.0 look and feel for the user
- A new UI design with improved navigation
- Gain enhanced productivity through a better, cleaner user interface
If you are interested further to learn more about Kovair Release 7.0 New User Interface, please visit http://www.kovair.com/landing-page/kovair70.html
Requirements Management
Learn how Kovair helps you to collaborate and manage requirements better than documents can
- Gain end to end traceability; between requirements, requirements to tests, test to test run and test runs to defect
- See how you can bring your existing requirements documents into Kovair
- Generate professional looking and up to date requirements documents quickly and easily
- Organize and control access to requirements with fine granularity
- Clone and reuse requirements and their related items in one step!
- Versioning, including branch/merge capability to help manage variants
If you are interested further to learn more about Requirements Management, please visit http://www.kovair.com/products/kovair-alm-studio.html
Test Management
Get a real time view with the test management dashboard
- See how the ‘unfold item’ feature allows easy reuse of test steps
- Learn how defects are created by test failure
- Gain an automatic relation between the defect and the test run where the defect was detected
If you are interested further to learn more about Test Management, please visit http://www.kovair.com/alm-solutions/test-management.html
Traceability
Acquire an ability to maintain end to end traceability in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool chain; even with disparate tools that have limited or no facilities to deal with relations
- See Kovair’s configurable and flexible system for tracking relations in action
- Learn 3 easy ways to view and manage traceability relations
- Export relationship data, track impacts, and more!
If you are interested to learn more about Traceability, please visit http://www.kovair.com/products/kovair-alm-studio.html
Agile Solution
Learn how Kovair helps you to track and manage backlogs
- Categorize backlogs into Epics, Features, User Stories and Defects
- Gain end to end traceability among the backlogs – Epics to Features, Features to User Stories, and Backlogs to other artifacts – User Stories to Tests, Test to Test Run and Test Runs to Defects
- Product Owner can rate, prioritize and rank User Stories in Kovair and then assign those to Sprints
- Learn how Tasks are created and assigned to the various team members for a User Story and how these Tasks are getting worked on and the time spent being recorded in the Timesheet.
If you are interested to learn more about Agile Solution, please visit http://www.kovair.com/alm-solutions/agile-methodology.html
Kovair ITSM Studio – IT Service Management
Learn how Kovair’s Service Catalog provides easy-to-use ability to submit service requests for various types of services, report an incident, problem submit a change record.
- Get a glimpse of best practice process workflow definition for Incident, Problem and Change process areas.
- Learn about Kovair’s task management and business rules implementation capability. E.g. automatic creation of problem when incident is escalated and also automatic creation of change record when problem is converted to change.
- Out-of-box dashboard and rich set of pre-defined reports with drill-down capability.
Traceability relations giving complete visibility. E.g. Transactions (Incident to Problem to Change), Contacts (CIs assigned / allocated to them and SRs, Incidents, Problems and Changes reported by them), Configuration Items (CI assigned to Contacts, CI relation with other CIs and SRs, Incidents, Problems and Changes reported for the CI).
If you are interested to learn more about IT Service Management, please visit http://www.kovair.com/products/kovair-itsm-studio.html
Thank you for taking the time to visit this Blog and hope that your time was well spent watching some of these videos and learning more not just about Kovair but some of these topics in general. We are happy to share our perspectives by way of these collaterals and welcome your views.
Sincerely,
Bipin Shah
CEO and Chairman
Kovair Software
