IBM's Rational Software unit Monday listed 20 products that will use its new collaboration technology for development teams whose members are separated geographically or are dispersed throughout a company facility.

The products - from IBM and partners - that incorporate the new Jazz technology will all be available before the end of 2008, IBM said. Each has garnered feedback from the approximately 15,000 people who accessed the technology since IBM launched a Jazz community in January, noted Dave Locke, Rational's director of offerings go-to-market. IBM has said it envisions that Jazz will evolve like the Eclipse open source development framework that IBM built and launched and then spun off to a community-based open source model.

IBM announced Monday at its IBM Rational Software Development Conference in Orlando that the collaboration technology will eventually be included in its entire Rational portfolio of products.

The 20 products now supporting the technology include new and upgraded products from IBM and 11 products from IBM partners. One new IBM product, Rational Team Concert will weave in social networking tools like instant messaging and presence awareness to application development management. Due to be available June 30 in a standard edition for mid-sized companies and small teams in larger companies, the software aims to automate data collection to reduce documentation, team meetings and status reports by half, IBM said.

For example, Locke added, the new tool will allow all those involved in a software development project to "collaborate in context," to understand workflow and who is working on what piece of the project.

"How do I know who I need to contact for any given piece of the project, especially when you're working in a very geographically dispersed way?" Locke said. "I wrote some code. Who is my tester, or who is the business analyst who came up with this idea? This notion of collaborating in context is all about team awareness. As work gets done, the right people are notified. As I have a question, the tool will know who created that thing or who has the knowledge about that business requirement, model or test."

Rational expects to have an enterprise edition of Rational Team Concert available in 2009, which will include full equivalent versions of IBM Rational ClearCase, IBM Rational ClearQuest and IBM Rational BuildForge. IBM also announced IBM Rational Team Concert Express-C Edition, a free version that uses open source Tomcat and Derby technology and can be used to show teams how the tool can be used work in their environments.

IBM Monday also announced a beta version of IBM Rational Requirements Composer, which incorporates Jazz to help software development teams agree on how a project should be designed by using story boards, sketches, scenarios and models. A beta version of IBM Rational Quality Manager aims to provide a single view into all aspects of a quality plan with comprehensive test planning and process software to trace where a project stands the development cycle, IBM said. Thus, managers can prioritize issues that need to be solved to help move the project forward.

A slew of IBM partners, including Black Duck Software, Cast Software, CM-Logic, Mainsoft, iRise, Ravenflow and WebLayers also announced Monday that they are working with IBM so their products will support Jazz.