Make GCM more extensible and customizable

Global Configuration Management (GCM) is an application that enables organizations to construct a view of the products and their major components and link this product portfolio view to the engineering artifacts (requirements, designs, tests, etc.) used in that particular component or product. GCM enables linkage of engineering artifacts to products and components that is very open and flexible and does not assume a particular way of managing artifact versions and variants. The OSLC approach acknowledges that there are many different tools involved in the engineering process and allows each of those tools to work in its own way while still connecting in a highly granular way to the common taxonomy of products and components. However GCM today is primarily designed to support the IBM ELM suite today. This idea would allow the basic GCM concepts to be extended and behaviors customized to suit the needs of different engineering organizations, and enable integration of additional data about the product portfolio from other data sources. GCMX would be delivered as a new application in the ELM portfolio built as an extension on the existing ELM GCM application allowing customers and partners to extend the scope and usage of GCM and make it applicable to a broader part of the engineering community within an organization.