Rational Team Concert provides an easy-to-use, web-based admin utility to set up, configure, and tune the JTS. The server utility allows you to configure the database, e-mail, user management, and LDAP.

The web-based admin UI provides a way to see the server status, accessed users, and license settings. If you need to configure users in a large organization, you can use "import LDAP users" to ease the admin task.

Rational Team Concert has integrated the products such as Rational Quality Manager, Rational Requirements Composer, Rational ClearQuest, and Rational ClearCase. These built-ins are achieved with the help of importer and connector components.

With the built-ins, you can take full advantage of already existing infrastructure—ClearQuest, ClearCase, Requirements Composer, and others—in your organization. You can link the work items from Rational Team Concert to Requirements Composer and then trace them to the test cases and test plans in the Quality Manager. In this way, you get a seamless integration of existing tools with Rational Team Concert.

Several third-party integrations are available to give a total flexibility to you so that you decide what to use and integrate. Some of the current offerings include but do not limit to Hudson, Cruise Control, Subversion, CVS, JIRA, HP Quality Center, Google Talk, and Skype.

Agile project management can get tricky with large and distributed teams. Without the use of proper tools and integrated methods, project management can get complex. Rational Team Concert provides you a set of tools that would allow you to create plans for individual development tasks, sprints, releases, and builds. All the planning activities are connected back to the version control and issue management software. You can see the work load of an individual developer, current tasks that a developer is working on, track the release progress, and see the project health from the nightly builds.

A very interesting feature is that the Rational Team Concert provides a graphical planning feature that shows the tasks that are in progress, done, and to be done. This can be used to run daily scrum meetings without any extra effort. As a manager, you could get the overview of the sprint's risk from the project dashboard and take corrective action early in the phase.

Continuous integration and nightly builds are becoming rather necessary tasks in any software development projects. Rational Team Concert not only integrates the continuous builds but also does more than the basic features of a "build".

Rational Team Concert supports the Ant, Maven, and command line build systems out of the box. That means you can re-use existing Ant and Maven scripts from your projects and get the additional benefits of integrated build tracking, traceability, build reproducibility, build compare, and build health.

Traditionally, you spend a lot of time and effort to write process documents, train the project team to use the process, and finally to enforce the process rules into the system. While implementing the process, there is always an extra overhead introduced due to the manual errors and also you are left with team members who are unhappy as they need to follow the boring process and spend considerable time on process implementation.

Rational Team Concert takes the approach of "teaching your tools about the process". All your best practices can be directly configured into the Rational Team Concert, which will help you know the process violations on the fly. This makes it possible for you to concentrate on the real business problem and let the Rational Team Concert take care of the process implementation.

The great value of the process awareness in Rational Team Concert is the ability for you to choose from out of the box processes such as Scrum, Eclipse Way, and OpenUp. If your organization defines its own process, then you can define it as a new process and save it as a template for future uses. The Organizational process template used with your team's customization is a powerful way to leverage the process awareness.

Rational Team Concert understands the human aspects of who is in your team, who is who, and the technical aspects of team artifacts. You can get an overview of the team builds, team members, different release plans, and work items. Configure the team members that you want to see and track their work item's progress.

Setting up a new team and adding the team members to the team are very intuitive and at the end of team set up, the individual team members would be notified through e-mails. As a team member you would receive an e-mail with all the necessary details of how to join the team and immediately you can start working on then work items of the project.

Collaboration is enabled through context-sensitive communication—chat and team feeds. As soon as a user becomes online, you can chat and exchange files directly in the context of Rational Team Concert. This means, you can directly start chatting with your colleague to talk about a defect number and the chat client would turn it into links that your colleague can open and work with. Team feed is a great way to get informed about the work items, builds, and team events.

Work items are the building blocks in Rational Team Concert that enables you to track and co-ordinate the tasks and workflows. Work items are used to connect the Rational Team Concert's sprint planning, change sets, and builds.

Eclipse IDE, Visual Studio, and the web-based interface allow you to create, modify, and query the work items. You could also share the frequent queries with the team. You can add specific approval process to critical work items and have it marked with different status Ids such as pending, approved, or verified.

You can create the work items or import the items from the built-in adapters. Currently you can import the work items from Bugzilla, Rational ClearQuest, and CSV. All the importers allow you to define an XML file that contains the mappings from source formats to work item's attributes.

Rational Team Concert has a component-based source control system that supports geographically distributed teams. The source control system supports a highly integrated collaborative development environment, integration with defect tracking, and integration with builds. The storage model is entirely based on change set, which provide atomic changes to sets of files. Change sets are the base currency and can be shared (through work items), suspended, discarded, and reverted.

The source control provides a full tracking of file moves and renames. You can quickly suspend the task at hand and start a high priority task. Once that task is finished, you can resume the suspended task.

Rational Team Concert provides project dashboards and reports that give an overview of the project's health. You can get several reports based on the task priority, team member, burn-down charts, and many more. The project dashboards are a great way for the management and external stake holders to get the overview of the project's progress. Rational Team Concert provides more than 50 reporting templates and all of them are configurable depending on then process.

You can export the reports from a project in the forms of PDF, PostScript, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint, and present them to the higher management as status reports. You could get a variety of the project activity reports such as the work item report, source control reports, and build reports.