This is a short work week in Australia – Friday is a public holiday to celebrate the arrival of Europeans to colonise the country in 1778 – so it’s interesting that I spent two of my four working days getting a little further with IBM/Rational RequisitePro … it’s now installed.

This was an exercise that seemed more difficult than it should have been, but we have it in, up and creating “projects”. It integrates with MS Word, and has template documents for various deliverables. It also claims to be able to import from Excel or Word and identify requirements from the contents – if this works even reasonably well it could put existing documents to good use. We have installed the Web client (we have a temporary license for a single user – the Web version (or “roaming” license) has a list price north of $8000) and I have successfully created a ‘sandbox’ project from it, created a couple of documents and saved it all to the attached DB2 database. The license manager doesn’t seem to survive a reboot – it seems I have to re-import the license after a restart to get access again.

As a bit of background, we will use it (until April 12th anyway) to assist in compiling requirements for a document/content management system – we have been given isolated requirements for pieces of the puzzle, but the colleague responsible for some of these has decided to step back a little and see if there is a more useful approach to satisfying the splintered requests. It will be interesting to see if RequisitePro helps.

The ever-helpful James has already found a potential SaaS alternative for requirements gathering (via email – more later), and Cote’  (in a follow-up post on Lotus Connections) has another crack at IBM and its pussyfooting with SaaS …

In the meantime, Joe McKendrick offers hope of continued employment, with a post that posits that corporate bodies that “get” SOA are thin on the ground, and could be in high demand soon. From next week we’ll be testing our low-key ESB implementation which should be some fun.

It’s now Friday here, so happy Australia Day, my weekend has started.

[Update] – James has come up with two SaaS requirements possibilities already: Accept 360 and Gatherspace.

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