In the first chapter, we have seen several things to consider when joining a new team, such as getting the project details, source control login information, repository access, and so on. Rational Team Concert tackles these issues by letting the administrator log in to the server or client and adds the new team member to the project. The system will immediately send an e-mail to the new team member with all the details he needs to start working. This reduces the probability of mistakes when providing the information because all team members receive uniform information.

In this section, we will see how to accept a team invitation for a team member with user ID fgerhardt and set up the complete project to start working on. As a team member, the Team Artifacts view lets us to accept the team invitation, as shown next:

The Accept Team Invitation action needs us to enter the e-mail content in the message area. Enter the invitation e-mail content and click on Finish.

The following screenshot shows the content of an e-mail sent to a team member when an administrator invites him to join a project. It contains the link to access the web UI and the details of how to log in to the client. The first time when we, as a new team member, log in to the client, we have a variety of actions to do such as Accept Team Invitation, Connect to Project Area, and so on. Accept a Team Invitation will do everything necessary for us to start working on the project.

The Rational Team Concert client sets up the complete project for us. We could see that the project area and streams are set up and components are displayed. The Team Artifacts view gives us a high-level view of the project. We can browse the work items assigned to us and create a local repository workspace to start working on these. When we join the project for the first time, we may not have any project-related work items.

Another major chunk of information is in the project area editor (see the following screenshot). The editor has all the information we need to know about the project, including the following:

In this section, we have seen how to accept team invitation in no time and set up the complete project to work on. In the next section, we will see in-depth details on the team source control and how a team member can leverage its powerful features.

The next section assumes that we are logged in as an admin user and all the steps are done using the admin user.