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Hoping to bring together disparate teams to make beautiful software music, IBM’s Rational division is expected to release the first commercial products from its Jazz collaborative software development project on June 30.

IBM revealed details of the Team Concert series of products Monday before an estimated audience of 3,500 at the IBM Rational Software Developer Conference in Orlando. Nine product announcements from IBM were complemented by 11 from third-party vendors.

The software giant began research on the Jazz collaboration project in 2004 to overcome the difficulties faced when development teams are made up of people from different business units, time zones, job duties or even different companies. In January 2008, IBM released an open-source version of Jazz to the developer community, soliciting feedback through a site called Jazz.net.

“The focus of Jazz is to find a real-time collaborative environment in which you have the context and the team awareness and the process awareness of how we are going to work together,” said David Locke, director of go-to-market products for IBM Rational.

Team Concert is a development server that automates several parts of the process and displays a dashboard that team members can view to stay current on its status, said Locke. It features blogs, instant messaging and other social networking tools to keep team members informed. For example, the automated workflow of Team Concert allows the architect of the software project to notify specific developers when they need to start working on their part of the project.

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