Recently, we opened up our CloudForge platform to allow unlimited free TeamForge projects; previously only available to CloudForge Agile Enterprise subscribers. This alone represents a big leap forward in the functionality available within CloudForge: issue tracking, document storage, wiki, and discussion forums within a single platform integrated with subversion and Git. However, we also took this opportunity to make a few sizable changes in our implementation of TeamForge to better integrate TeamForge with CloudForge and improve your user experience.
The first new feature that users will encounter is single sign-on (SSO) between CloudForge and TeamForge. Whereas CloudForge has been the administrative interface to manage projects, services, and users, TeamForge was the project workspace to track issues, share documents and collaborate. Now there is a single entry point for both, when a user logs into CloudForge he or she is also logged directly into TeamForge as well and can access all of the organization’s projects – based on their roles and permissions, of course. Users can also bookmark project pages anywhere in TeamForge and land on those pages after authentication. All of this obviates the need for separate interfaces to administrate projects and to perform day-to-day tasks within a project.
In the vein of UI consolidation, CloudForge’s TeamForge has a new look and feel giving a more uniform appearance across the platform. Utilizing the branding capabilities and the integration data services of TeamForge we were able to quickly customize TeamForge with an entirely new CSS, updated images, and new CloudForge-specific menu items. Anyone who has used TeamForge in the past, either within CloudForge or as a standalone ALM platform, will notice the differences immediately. Some of these changes are a teaser of things to come when TeamForge 7.0 releases later this year.
Although we think TeamForge looks much better now, our changes weren’t limited simply to the appearance of TeamForge; we also added some new features to TeamForge completely unique to CloudForge. Features such as integrating the CloudForge Activity Stream into the TeamForge project workspace and adding a quick-link menubar item for submitting new tracker artifacts.
The new TeamForge look and feel with integrated activity stream and quick link to submit issues.
Within the the menu_bar.vm of the TeamForge Look Project add:
#if (${menuBar.currentProjectPath})
<li class="dropdown"><a class="dropdown-toggle" href="#">
Submit Artifact
<b></b>>/a>
#if ($!API50.sessionKey)
<ul class="dropdown-menu">
#set ( $trackers = $API50.trackerApp.getTracker2List($API50.sessionKey, $PAGE_INFO.projectId).getDataRows())
#if ( $ARRAY.length($trackers) > 0)
#foreach ($tracker in $trackers)
<li class="dropdown">
<a href="${LINK.getPageUrl(${menuBar.urlBase},">$tracker.title</a>
</li>
#end
#else
<li class="dropdown">No Trackers Available</li>
#end
</ul>
#end
</li>
#end
Overall, we are pretty happy with how things have progressed so far but we are far from done improving our offering of both CloudForge and TeamForge. We hope that you will test it out and send us some more feedback so we can continuously improve.
