Rocket Updates Aldon Change Management Products

June 5, 2012 Alex Woodie

Rocket Software last week unveiled new releases of three change management products it obtained with its acquisition of Aldon last year. Rocket Aldon Lifecycle Manager (Enterprise Edition) for IBM i was updated with new application deployment capabilities and integration with Apache Subversion, while new releases of the Rocket Aldon Web Portal and Rocket Aldon Report Manager products help organizations track build deployments and user activity, including from smartphones and tablets.

Last week’s announcement of Lifecycle Manager (Enterprise Edition) 6.2 for IBM i, Web Portal 1.2, and Report Manager 1.6 mark the first substantive release of the Aldon software since Rocket acquired the company from Marlin Equity Partners in April 2011.

According to Rocket, Aldon Lifecycle Manager (LMe) 6.2 gets new capabilities to automate the process of importing and deploying build results at any stage of the development lifecycle. It also gives users the capability to automatically synchronize its promotion and deployment repository with the open source Subversion (SVN) version control system anytime developers commit a change to their SVN repository.

The new release of LMe also brings new support for Microsoft Windows. Rocket says users can now perform LMe functions directly within the Windows Explorer interface. LMe 6.2 also includes the version 2.1 release of the Aldon Security Server.

LMe is Aldon’s cross-platform product for application lifecycle management (ALM) for IBM i, Unix, Linux, and Windows OSes, and is separate from Rocket Aldon Lifecycle Manager (IBM i Edition), or LMi. Rocket did not enhance LMi, which only supports the IBM i OS.

Rocket also unveiled a new IBM i version of the Web Portal for LMe, which it also calls the Rocket Aldon Lifecycle Manager Web Portal. The new release of the Web Portal, which can be installed directly on the IBM i server, includes new installation reports and also enables users to track software deployments from any Web browser, including Web-enabled mobile devices.

“In this age of BYOD [bring your own device], customers demand access to information from their smartphones and tablets and they want to have the ability to take action from anywhere at any time. Our newest release gives them this capability to do so with a tap of a finger,” states Dan Magid, Rocket’s managing director of product management, in a press release.

Report Manager 1.6 introduces two new permission reports for LMi designed to bolster audit compliance efforts. The “Permissions by Release” report gives details for actions a user can perform for a release, along with the source from which authorities are derived, Rocket says, while the “Permissions by User” provides details for the authority records that exist for a user and actions that may be performed.

The new releases of the Aldon products are available immediately. For more information, see the Rocket Aldon website at aldon.rocketsoftware.com.