Add "sources" that populate activity streams with relevant "activity" data such as work item updates, commits, CI builds, and code reviews.
What is a source? - TeamForge is an open development platform with a strong notion associations. Within TeamForge, any two objects can be associated together, and when multiple associations are chained together, they create "traceability". But what about tools outside of TeamForge? Orchestrate provides just such a mechanism, allowing you to add relevant project tools to the TeamForge project context. This is accomplished through "sources", which represent light-weight integrations to external products. Once established, "sources" capture activity data from external tools, bringing them into the TeamForge project context and associations fabric.
For work items, sources are issue trackers; for SCM commits, sources are defined as the code repository of interest; for CI builds, sources are "jobs" or "build configurations"; for code reviews, sources are defined as the project or repository of interest.
How do sources work? - Whenever an "activity" occurs in a tool that has been setup as a project source, a special "adapter" sends notification of the activity to TeamForge Orchestrate. For example, if a specific Jenkins job is configured as a source, build information will be sent to TeamForge Orchestrate when that Jenkins job is executed. The resulting activity is mapped to the TeamForge project in question. A TeamForge project can have multiple sources, all sending their activity data to the TeamForge project.
Associations - Other than capturing external activities and displaying them in an activity stream, Orchestrate draws associations between these activities. In some cases, this is entirely automatic, other cases require user input to help Orchestrate draw accurate associations. See Associations.
Extensibility - TeamForge Orchestrate is extensible; users may author their own adapters for new source types and even register new product domains. If your organization uses tools that do not yet have adapters, you can write your own adapter that sends activity data to TeamForge Orchestrate. See Extending TeamForge Orchestrate.