We've been a little quiet at Solution Manager Expert early in the year, but for good reason: we've been working on three related articles with Solution Manager implementation and governance expert D. Russell Sloan of IBM Global Business Services.

Russell has written dozens of articles for us in the past, and started off 2012 in a similarly prolific way, with these three titles:

• Sync Your Global Template with Your Productive System for Better ALM
• Analyze Changes in a Solution to Support the Roll-In of New or Changed Processes
• Quick Tip: Determine the BPH Structure Context in a Solution or Project 

They started off as one piece, namely the first one, looking at syncing global templates across the enterprise so that important changes aren't missed. Other than improving your enterprise's application life cycle management (ALM), such a process also helps with the auditability of your system, which Russell discusses.

Since he's using Solution Manager 7.0, Microsoft Excel plays an important role in gathering the data in your solution or project. The more we worked on the article, the more we realized that the analysis of the data that was compiled in Excel became essentially its own topic and couldn't be buried within a larger article. That's why we separated out "Analyze Changes in a Solution to Support the Roll-In of New or Changed Processes" to live on its own.

Finally, we noticed a third process that similarly needed its own treatment, and this is where the quick tip comes in. Russell describes a quicker way for finding a process in one solution or project and then using it in another. The process involves cross-tab analysis, which is available both in 7.0 (which the other two articles are focused on) and 7.1.

We hope these articles are worth the wait. If you're interested in checking out more of Russell's Solution Manager Expert articles, go here.