Polarion Software Weblog

What do Polarion and Coca Cola have in common? (Besides the fact that Coke powers some of our developers?) Well, it seems both companies have a weak spot for the endangered Polar Bear.

Since 2009, Polarion has been a loyal supporter and fundraiser for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) campaign to save the Polar Bear. We knew many people have the same concern, but until this week we didn’t realize we had some august company in this effort.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Coca Cola is launching a new campaign to preserve Polar Bear habitat and raise awareness of the issue. We applaud! We had of course seen the ads with Coke’s bears, but we didn’t realize that Coke is also a staunch WWF and Polar Bear supporter. (More applause!) But what we don’t know is:

WHY DID COKE CHOOSE THE POLAR BEAR AS A MASCOT?

We do know why Polarion did. Polarion is the fixed point that guides over 1 million users through the complexities of application development every day. That’s why our company logo represents the Pole star (Polaris) on the horizon. That northern idea naturally suggested “Polar Bear”, so we created this guy who pops here and there, even in Polarion itself:

But… our mascot species is endangered. We couldn’t just stand by and not make an effort. Obviously the folks at Coca Cola feel the same. So you have a choice:

• Buy Coke’s cute bear, and they’ll donate profits to WWF. But you’ll have to go out looking for one.
• Donate to WWF on our website and Polarion will match your donation dollar-for-dollar and send you some cool Polar bear goodies! You can do that right now, online!

Well, writing this post has made me thirsty…

The Polarion R&D team delivered Service Release 2 (2011-SR2) for all Polarion products. In addition to fixes, usability, and performance improvements, several new features were introduced:

New Features

• Import from Microsoft Excel: You can now import Excel workbooks containing requirements, test cases, or other types of artifacts, creating Work Items which can then be managed with Polarion. You have the option of importing artifacts as tracker-based Work Items, or Document-based Work Items. You can define custom import rules and save them as Import Configurations for reuse with similar Excel documents on subsequent imports. To see it in action, check out the video tutorial. (Polarion ALM, Polarion REQUIREMENTS)
• Round-trip for Microsoft Excel: You can now export Work Items to an Excel workbook, controlling which Work Item fields are included in the export, and whether or not they are locked in Excel. Also, you can optionally allow external users to modify the structural hierarchy of Work Items. External users can edit the allowed content, after which you can import the workbook back to Polarion, updating the Work Items in the portal from the changes in the Excel document. (Polarion ALM, Polarion REQUIREMENTS)
• Interactive Report Pages: A new set of page parameter macros enables page authors to easily create visual fields that let page users input different values and vary the information reported on the page. For example, a page might show a burn-down chart for a sprint. By using the new macros, the author can enable page users to select which sprint. It is even possible to allow page users to make a persistent change in the default value of a page parameter. For details, see the Wiki Syntax Help for the {parameter} and related macros, and the Help topic “Creating Interactive Report Pages”. (Polarion ALM, Polarion Requirements)
• New Browser Support: Release 2011-SR2 delivers support for Firefox version 5 and version 6. The latest 6.x version is recommended. (All products)

Significant Improvements and Enhancements

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We have some more video tutorials online and ready for you to watch while beating the summer heat lounging by the pool or on the beach.

User tutorials:
There’s a 2-part video on the basics of Polarion Projects covering how to create and manage them, plus tips for dealing with old/inactive projects:

We also have a new tutorial on the Repository Browser which also includes tips on how to use external Subversion clients with the Polarion repository:

Administrator tutorial:
Another fairly new one, which has been online for a while, but I guess we didn’t announce it on the blog yet:



Doing configuration in the correct scope is an important concept that sometimes trips up new Polarion admins. Hopefully this video will take care of that!

THANKS FOR THE COMMENTS!

Just a word to acknowledge and say thanks for the comments you’ve been submitting on the videos page. We’re already incorporating some of the feedback in the new videos we had planned, and we have planned some additional tutorials people have asked for.

The full list of our Tutorial Videos is available at www.polarion.com/tutorials

By default, Polarion installs and uses a Subversion repository. But what if you have some codebase in an external repository… a Git repo, for example? And if you’re new to Git, how do you set up a repository? This post provides a few practical tips to help you get Git, and once you’ve got Git, get going so you can link Git revisions to Polarion Work Items.

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We have a new 5-minute video tutorial that demonstrates the basics of working with Polarion 2011′s Round-trip for Microsoft Word (a.k.a. “Word Round-trip”) feature. You can find the video at www.polarion.com/video/tutorials/wordroundtrip/ (you’ll find the full list of tutorial videos at www.polarion.com/tutorials/)

Word Round-trip facilitates collaboration on requirements or other specifications with external people who don’t have access to your Polarion portal. You export a Polarion LiveDoc document, specifying one of several levels of change you allow the recipient. Your recipient reads and edits the document in Microsoft Word. When you get it back, you import the edited Word document into Polarion, updating your LiveDoc document, including its History.

Round-trip can also be handy if you want to work on the content of a LiveDoc document off-line on that next train or plane trip.

Keep in mind that although it’s possible for the Word user to change some Work Item data field values, Word Round-trip isn’t intended as a substitute for Polarion’s Work Item management tools. It’s mainly a feature aimed at collaboration on content. So check out the video and see how Word Round-trip can help you collaborate better with your clients, customers, or others who use Word, but not Polarion.