Essential was the subject of a very favourable review by the Journal of Enterprise Architecture in May last year, and we have just received permission from JEA to publish the review on our website.  David Rice subjected Essential Architecture Manager to a thorough review and noted the following:-

‘Stability: The distributors of Essential Architecture Manager built the tools on top of proven technology and it shows, in my time evaluating Essential I had no system failures or unexpected behavior. This is certainly notable for both free software and a version 1.0 product.’

‘Bottom line, with the Essential Modeler an EA practitioner should feel more connected to the data and thus the EA can accomplish a key capability – to empower decisions.’

‘One can argue all day about the good or bad qualities and capabilities of a given meta-model – and people frequently do just that in standards groups. Rather than have that debate in this forum I simply looked at their meta-model for completeness and appropriateness to the task at hand – capturing EA data and relationships. In my opinion the model is quite sufficient to do just that.’

‘The mindset of the Essential designers seems to match that of more experienced EA practitioners in that they realize real value is in the information about the enterprise and relationships of that information – not a box or a line on a diagram. The approach is that of separating the concerns of capturing, validating and analyzing the information from Reporting and Publishing.’

Click on the document (left) to download a print-quality PDF of the full Journal of Enterprise Architecture - Review of Essential Architecture Manager.