One of the great things about Rational Team Concert is it brings an awareness to a Development team. Now outside of the CLM Dashboards and the thick clients that awareness continues in the forms of email and news feeds. Now everyone knows email but when left unchecked your Inbox can become unmanageable.

My personal preference is to use the news feed capability of Rational Team Concert. Not only does it provide notifications out of my inbox but it allows me to have greater control over what I want to see. I can take any work item query and turn it into a feed.

That being said I have had trouble for some time trying to get the Feed Reader in the IBM Notes Client to read the feeds from Rational Team Concert.

The problem is the default authentication mechanism in CLM is form authentication rather than basic authentication. The IBM Notes Client does not make this easy.  Here are the steps I took to enable form authentication of feeds in the IBM Notes Client.

Creating the feed in Rational Team Concert.

In Rational Team Concert you can create a feed of nearly anything. Unfortunately creating a feed from the web interface is a bit difficult but from the client is quite easy.

1. Start by creating a Work Item query of the news you are interested.  I should mention that there are other events that can be subscribed to other than work items.
2. Right click the query in the Team Artifacts view and select “Subscribe to Query Feed.”
   
3. Retrieve the URL for that feed subscription by right clicking the new feed and selecting “Copy Feed URL.”
   

Enabling Form Authentication in the IBM Notes Client

1. First thing is to create a new account for Form Authentication In your Notes Client by selecting to
   1. File
   2. Preferences
   3. Accounts
   4. New Account
2. Set the following information
   1. Basics
      1. Account Name: <anything>
      2. Type: HTTP/HTTPS
      3. Server: https://<Server Host Name>
   2. Log in information
      1. Select “Use direct log in or single sign on.”
      2. Enter your user name and password.
   3. Advanced Properties
      1. Authentication URL: https://<Server Host Name>/<Context Root>/service/com.ibm.team.repository.service.internal.webuiInitializer.IWebUIInitializerRestService/j_security_check
      2. Authentication Type: J2EE Form (advanced)

Conclusion

Now the feed you copied from the client should work in the IBM Notes client feed reader.

The beauty of this is you can now create notifications with a greater amount of flexibility. For instance you can use a single feed to notify an entire team when a new Critical defect is submitted.