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We’ve been kinda quiet on this blog since the summer, not because we all took the autumn off, but because we’ve been working feverishly behind the scenes reviewing the Essential roadmap and preparing a major new release which we are planning to make available early in 2012.

We will be releasing Essential Architecture Manager v3, which includes new versions of the meta model, the software platform and the viewer as well as updated training modules – I did say we’d been busy!

The roadmap below gives you a taster of what is in v3 and what we are planning beyond this (click on the roadmap to view a larger image):-

There’s a lot of new and, we think, exciting stuff in here.  We will include full details when we release it, but to whet your appetite ………….

The Strategy Management area has been completely overhauled to provide support for defining and managing Architecture States (current and future – by layer or strategic project as required) and for defining and managing architectural roadmaps, with milestones and timelines, to demonstrate how the organisation will move from one architectural state to another with supporting Strategic Plans.  In addition the Change Management area has been updated to allow change programmes, projects and activities to be defined which detail the strategic plans that will deliver the roadmap transitions.

An example Roadmap view:-

Information quality and security are key to any organisation and, due to much demand, we have enhanced both areas.  Data Standards Management now provides the ability to manage Data Quality across the organisation, whilst Security Management allows an organisation to define its Security Architecture and its relationship to the resources in the organisation.  In addition to the usual application of these areas, we have been able to resolve other issues for organisations, such as providing the required regulatory views for movement of data across country borders, with a long term solution that is quick and easy to implement by simply adding to the information artefacts already captured.

Some example Data Management and Security views:-

There are also a number of other smaller additions to the meta model which provide benefit across the repository as a whole, for example, Data Governance (a peer of Data Standards Management in Data Management); Taxonomy (enabling user-defined classifications to be applied to any element); Geography (for including geographical location information with elements such as Site) and Synonym (for any element in the model).

We are always looking at how we can provide more benefit and we have developed a new and innovative solution to help organisations get information into the repository as quickly and efficiently as possible, in support of our view that capturing the data is the means to the end (views/reports/analysis of the information) rather than the end itself.  We have developed a Spreadsheet Export and Import facility which allows the user to define a spreadsheet from within Essential, incorporating a series of worksheets and including data from the existing repository if required.  This is then exported to excel and allows almost anyone within the organisation to capture the required information by simply filling in the spreadsheet; no modelling knowledge is required for this task.  The information in the spreadsheet is then imported directly into Essential, populating the repository and creating the required links and relationships between the captured artefacts.  This is not only quick,  it also allows the data capture to be completed by more and cheaper resources; the person with the EA knowledge is then freed up to concentrate on the important tasks.

We’ve be using this in beta for a few months,and it is proving hugely effective at capturing large amounts of quality data quickly.

 

All the existing training modules have been updated to take account of v3 and new modules have been created for the new areas, all of which are now readily available.

Finally, you have probably noticed from the screenshots that we also have a brand new Essential Viewer. We’ve taken the time to think about what users, especially business users, really want from the reports  and have created a look and feel that’s clean, friendly and focused. It also features active filters to show or hide elements on a page which we think are a great way to simplify the content on a page without building a whole new view. There are also some less obvious but powerful features such as dynamic linking. We’ve always been proud of the ability to navigate the architecture – moving up, down and across to discover more about your organisation – but previously each link only ever went to one place. In future, any link on a page can be configured to access any number of relevant views. For example, clicking on a Data Subject can take you to a Data Subject Summary, a Data Subject to Role matrix, a Data Subject to Application Matrix, etc. There’s nothing to learn, no training required, you click on a link and click where you want to go. It’s powerful and effortless.  For those who develop their own views, you can easily take advantage of this with just a few extra lines in your code. We’ve also developed a whole new CSS framework for Essential Viewer that helps you build great looking views for you organisation quickly. Finally, we know how important it is for these tools to feel like part of your own organisation and we have provided the ability to re-brand the viewer. You can add your own logos, colour schemes, fonts and portal name. This kind of branding used to take a lot of effort but now can be achieved extremely quickly. And of course, you can use the new viewer on your iPad or iPhone…

As always, these changes are driven by our clients and community, as are the next Essential developments.  We are always keen to hear your views and suggestions, please feel free to comment.

 

It’s been a couple of months since we released the Information and Data Pack and I thought it would be useful to take a more detailed look at what is in this extension to the Essential Meta Model and what it can do for us.

 

Firstly, thanks to our community members who have given us some feedback and found a couple of small bugs in there. We’ve started a forum thread to catch any more issues as we find them but will be releasing a patch and new version of the pack in the coming weeks – we wanted to make sure we had as many issues addressed in a single update as possible. If you’ve found any issues in there, please let us know in this forum.

 

This optional extension pack is a major extension to the Information layer of the meta model but although there are some tweaks of the core meta model elements, this is mostly an extension to what was already there.

 

We have added a number of important meta classes for managing Data elements and the relationships that these have to Application, Information and Business elements, enabling the resulting models to support Enterprise Data Management and Enterprise Information Management activities. More about that later in this blog.

 

One of the most important concepts in the pack is the separation between Information and Data. We have defined strong semantics for what is Information and what is Data, so that there is a clear and consistent framework for capturing and managing these elements of your Information and Data architecture.

 

We’ve based this on the commonly used “Information is Data in context” definition. Data elements have the same meaning and value regardless of the context in which they are used, whereas Information elements differ depending on the context. e.g. Product data means the same things regardless of whether we are looking it in the context of Stock, Sales, Manufacturing. That’s not to say that we only have one Product data element in our architecture, we can define as many variants of how Product data is managed in our organisation as we need – in terms of the attributes and relationships. e.g. Product Item data might have a different set of attributes to a Bill of Materials data object.

 

In contrast, Information takes data and uses it in a particular context. e.g. Stock Volume by Location might use data about Products at particular locations in the organisation and would have a different value for a single Product depending on the Location.

 

This separation of the Information and Data fits neatly into how we need to manage these things in the real world. Data combined and used to produce the Information that we need.

 

Naturally, we’ve used the Conceptual, Logical and Physical abstractions for the new Data metaclasses, covering the WHAT, HOW and WHERE for data elements. In addition to adding these new meta classes, we have created powerful relationship classes to them that enable us to clearly understand how Information and Data is being used by Applications and Business Processes. Some of this might seem a bit complex at first glance but this is due to the contextualised nature of these relationships. What we’ve created are constructs that enable us to understand what Information Applications use and create and in the context of that, which data elements are used, specifically, to deliver that Information – and in that context what are the CRUD for the Information and the Data. We believe that having these types of contextual relationships is a uniquely powerful capability of Essential Architecture Manager but we haven’t added these just because we can but because without them we cannot accurately or even reliably understand what is really going on in our organisation with respect to Information and Data.

 

So, what kind of things can we do with the Information and Data Pack?

We have designed the meta model to support Information Management and Data Management activities managing all the dependencies that exist between information and data elements and also how these are used by Application elements and how they are produced by Applications.

 

More specifically, in combination with the Views that are supplied out-of-the-box, we can understand where issues exist with our Master Data Management solutions, e.g.

• where are we mastering Product data?
• how is this data being supplied to our Applications?
• how does this compare to how data should be supplied to our applications (according to our MDM policies)?

 

As you will have come to expect, the supplied Views are easy-to-consume, hyperlinked perspectives that are designed to give valuable insights to a wide range of stakeholders – not just Information and Data professionals.

 

We can browse the Data catalogue, drill into individual subjects, see what Objects we have in each subject and how each of these objects is defined. Further drill-downs can take us to views that should how this Object is provided to the relevant applications in the enterprise and from where.

 

Based on the detailed CRUD information that we can capture in the model, we can easily produce CRUD matrices from a wide variety of perspectives, e.g. CRUD of Data Subjects by Business Capability, CRUD of Data Objects by Business Process – both of which are derived from the details in the model, which means that these are automatically updated as the content of the model is updated.

 

One of the most powerful Views is also one of the simplest. We find that providing a browser-based, easy-to-access place to find accurate and detailed definitions for all the Information and Data elements – and most importantly in easy-to-understand terms – is a capability that is quickly valued, in particular by non-technical stakeholders. Deliberately, there are no ERDs or UML class diagrams in these definitions. Rather, we can explore the catalogue of the Information and Data elements in a highly hyperlinked environment, providing an automatically generated data (and information) dictionary to the organisation.

 

In that context, we’ve introduced some nice little features that will be included across all the Views such as the ability to identify the content owner of particular elements or groups of elements. This means that if we see that the content on a View is incorrect, we can click a link and send an email to that owner to let them know that things have changed or that there’s an error in the content.

 

We recognise that while most of the meta model concepts for the Information and Data pack are straightforward, there are some more complex areas, in particular in the definition of relationships. As always, we’ve worked hard to keep these as simple as possible but the reality of how Information and Data is used and produced is (or at least can be!) complex and we need to able to capture and manage these complexities. However, the capabilities and results are worth the investment in understanding how to use these. For example, the way the Information to Application (and in that context, to Data) relationships work, enable us to understand how a packaged application has been configured in terms of how the out-of-the-box data structures are being used. This means that we can understand where Product Codes are being stored in Location Code tables, for example, and this is the kind of scenario where the ‘devil is in the detail’ and fine-grained things like this can become the source of a lot of larger-scale issues in the architecture.

 

We’ve already had some excellent feedback on the pack and based on demands from real-world use of Essential Architecture Manager, we are now looking to extend the granularity of the application-to-data relationships to include data attributes, rather than just data objects. You might not always need to go to that level of detail but if you do, the capability will be there – and this will be designed to enable you to model at asymmetrical levels of granularity.

 

Although it’s currently an optional extension, the Information and Data pack will be incorporated into the next baseline version of the meta model. We think that the game-changing capabilities of the Information and Data Pack are a vital part of the enterprise architecture model and so it is natural that this extension become part of the core meta model.

 

At The Essential Project we think the essence of EA is to support the decision making process within an organisation, and that this can be achieved by providing the right information to the right people at the right time.  This is not as easy as it sounds; how do you know who is going to need what information to support them in making which decision, when?  This has been the subject of other blogs, and I’m sure it will appear again so, short of saying that if you’re going about your EA in the right way you will understand the concerns of your stakeholders and so will have an idea of what they need to know, when and why, I’ll move on.

One of the big problems facing architects, I think, is that there is a huge amount of information available to support decision making, but it is not all in one place.  An organisation may have information in EA tools, BPM tools, CMBD’s, Data models, Application catalogues, localised spread sheets and so on.  It is not, therefore, an easy task to gather the information you need and formulate it into a suitable report.

We believe that what we refer to as an EA Content Hub (see diagram below) can resolve this issue by enabling the relevant information from all the disparate information sources to be combined in one place.  This gives access to the raw data from the various vertical silos and allows reports specific to the stakeholders in your organisation to be created to aid their decision making, from supporting CxO’s in strategy definition and implementation to supporting specific business, IS or infrastructure projects.   The EA Content Hub would not replace or remove the need for the other tools, as each will continue to have their own specific purpose to fulfil for the organisation.

We think this type of approach is crucial for EA going forward and will start to become widespread as it allows the EA Team to provide decision support across the organisation, across architecture layers and at various levels of detail – really what EA is all about.

We are seeing more and more demand for this type of approach from our user base and are successfully applying the Essential Project toolkit to support it. As we delve further into the specific capabilities needed, we are finding that Essential is well placed to perform the role of an EA Content Hub for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it has simple, but flexible integration capabilities and so importing the data from the various tools is relatively easy (most tools provide some form of XML-based data interchange format).  Secondly, it has a comprehensive meta-model, which allows most information to be imported without the need for significant modifications to be made.  Thirdly, Essential is geared towards organisations and architects defining the specific views that their stakeholders need, rather than relying on more generic out of the box reports, so the reports and views we are able to provide to stakeholders are geared specifically to answer their concerns and aid their decision making.

EAS, sponsors of the Essential project, recently held its first Essential training course for people looking to become affiliates of EAS, specialising in Essential. The delegates were from a wide range of geographical locations and so web based training seemed like the obvious format, to allow everyone to attend without incurring prohibitive travel and accommodation fees. There was some concern over the format as, although we’ve completed many different class room based courses and webinars over the years, we have not been involved in a full five day web based training course, either as presenters or delegates. We decided to split the five day course over a three week period as we had a gut feeling that five days of online training on the trot could prove difficult in terms of concentration and focus. I’m pleased to say that this format worked well and that the course was a resounding success!

Delegates commented that the web based format did not actually seem very different to being in a classroom. The sound was clear and the screen sharing not only allowed delegates to see the presenters screen for slides and demo’s, but also allowed them to share their own screen when completing exercises, if there were things they wanted to discuss or point out. They also found that it was just as easy to ask questions or have a discussion during the web training as it is in a classroom. As a trainer it did at times feel a bit odd – rather like you are talking to yourself! However, the course is designed to be interactive, with discussion points and exercises, so there wasn’t much time of just trainer talk, which is crucial in any training environment, but especially over the web!

The course covered all layers of the architecture and meta model, with the focus being on understanding the details of the meta model, our interpretation of EA and how we use Essential to support that. There is a lot of material and concepts to cover in a relatively short time, and so the delegates were pushed quite hard. They found that the split of the course over three weeks not only helped with their geographic location and availability, but it also proved extremely useful as it gave the time to fully digest the materials and contextualise the content to their own individual situations before moving on.

The feedback was very positive, both in terms of the quality of the training and also relating to the attendees views of Essential. The affiliates (as they are now) found that the course brought Essential to life and they were very impressed with its capabilities, particularly in the new information layer – which will be released shortly.

We are now advertising for our next Affiliate training course, which should take place in June/July and will again be web based. If you are interested we’d love to hear from you.

Of course training is not just for affiliates. If you are an organisation that has been using Essential, or if you’re new to it, you might find that a little training goes a long way in helping you and your team get up to speed with Essential and push your architecture efforts forward at a faster pace. If you are interested in receiving information on Essential training, please complete the Training Enquiry form.

We have noticed that many organisations are currently looking to their EA to support their strategy management, whether that be business and IT or just IT focused.  This is quite a shift for some organisations in moving EA up the stack and out of project or domain focused architecture to one that provides a broader, higher level view.

Our Strategy Management release is, therefore, very timely.  It has been in development for some time and was the focus of ECP 4, we would like to acknowledge and thank the community for their contributions to the release.   We have been using it at one of our global clients for some time and it is, therefore, released with us knowing that it actually works in real life situations – in a global organisation that has distributed businesses with differing regional and organisational objectives. 

A very brief overview of the key elements in this release is given below, but for full details see the release documentation:-

• Architecture States – represent the different states of your architecture.  Sometimes these are referred to as ‘current state’ and ‘future state’, but we think it is best to avoid these terms as your current state is always evolving and will eventually (one would hope!) become your future state, which makes everything somewhat confusing.  In our opinion it is better to actually refer to the state you are in (politely of course!) and the state you want to be in, including the steps in between.  So, an example of the type of naming we would suggest is ‘manual invoicing’, then ‘automated payment – UK’, followed by ‘automated invoicing – UK ’ and finally ‘fully automated invoicing’ , which allow you to understand exactly what each architecture state is referring to. 
  An architecture state can relate to one or all of the layers of the architecture, and this will depend on the type of project that is being transitioned. 
  We would expect there to be many of these very specific architecture states that reflect different areas of focus, rather than having a very few states that represent the entire EA at specific points in time.  We think the idea of lots of ‘smaller’, more specific architecture states is very powerful for managing the complexity of the progression of the architecture; break it into manageable chunks that deal with specific programmes or areas of interest and use lots of specific, focussed roadmaps rather than having one unwieldy uber roadmap.  However, if that is what you need to manage the transition of your EA then you can, of course, do just that! 
• Roadmap Model – is the pictorial representation showing how the architecture(s) will transition between the various different states, which are shown as roadmap milestones on the model.  A timeline for this transitioning can also be included in the model.
• Strategic Plans – hold the detail of how the organisation plans to transition from one state to another and are implemented by Projects, which can be grouped into Programmes.  Strategic Plans also hold the detail of what Issues are being addressed and Objectives are being met by the implementation of the Strategic Plans. 

There are a number of standard views released with the pack, but in true Essential spirit we expect users to develop their own views to meet the needs of their organisation.  The type of views we envisage being used are, for example, a view that maps Projects to Issues and Objectives, so you can see which projects support which Objectives and resolve which Issues.  This can be useful in allocating resources to the areas providing most benefit to the organisation. 

We feel that this is a key area of EA, and additionally it is one that is, or should be, the focus of many organisations at the moment as they move forward following the recession.  Using EA to assist with the strategy management within an organisation is really where the big pay back from EA can start to be seen.  Of course, all the underlying activities and effort are also crucial and can provide benefits on a project or region or domain basis, but using EA to support strategy management is the activity that can provide the overall view of where the organisation is now, where it wants to be, the plans it has for moving there and, crucially, can be used to ensure the organisation actually gets there.  It can do this by analysing information and then providing the insights, as stakeholder specific views, that highlight potential pitfalls and areas of opportunity and allowing these to be used to aid decision making and ensure the strategic plans are achieved.

We are always keen to hear your views, please let us know if you have any comments.

This question commonly pops up when we discuss Essential, either with our community, analysts or people in the EA business generally.  I think, in many cases, the underlying question is ‘is Essential any good if you are giving it away for free?’.  Well, based upon our experience in applying it as well as feedback from customers and Essential Project community members, we think so, but I still think it is worth explaining our rationale.

Essential began life as something we needed to support us in our early client engagements back in 2000/2001.  Initially we created a meta model to support our EA work and either implemented it in client’s existing tools or, where there was no tool, we tried implementing it using UML (Rational Rose).   We found that often, although better than PowerPoint or Excel which tends to end up as shelf ware, neither of these implementation approaches really gave our clients what they needed and so we looked to develop our own tool, around 2006. 

We were still not thinking of developing a tool as a commercial offering, we simply wanted something that would make our lives as EA consultants easier.  We also felt strongly that the true value of an EA repository was beyond purely documentation.  We wanted something to allow us to interrogate the EA ‘knowledge’, to allow us to make the valuable insights that make EA essential to an organisation, and this didn’t exist at that time in most EA tools – and especially not in organisations that had no tool at all!  Luckily for us, we stumbled upon Protégé, an ontology editor and knowledge-based framework developed by Stanford University (many thanks go out to them by the way), whilst actually looking at a different area of EA capability, and found that this met our needs completely, saving us much time and, I’m guessing, considerable heartache! 

So, Essential was born and it has served us well in many client engagements.  In fact we often found ourselves implementing it alongside traditional EA tools where the client had a need that the incumbent tool could not support without considerable time and money, but that Essential could support quite easily.  Also, when engagements came to an end, most organisations were able to keep Essential up and running to continue to provide value, be it a consolidated view of applications and their links to processes, or as a simple technology standards catalogue etc.  During this time we enhanced the tool and came to realise that, without really planning to, we had developed an EA tool that was not only easy to use and reliable, but that took a different approach to most other EA tools, moving away from the traditional documentation based approach to a more leading edge knowledge representation approach which suited our needs and the needs of our clients.

It was at this time that we came up with the idea of launching Essential as a free, open source EA tool for a number of reasons:-

• The objective of Essential was never really to directly compete with commercial EA tools.
• We had seen the value of it in our own engagements and we could see that others would find it equally useful, especially organisations that:-
  • were at the beginning of their EA journey and could not cost justify the expense of a commercial tool
  • did not yet understand the requirements of a tool, but that had a lot of information that they could capture that would provide vital decision support if only they could interrogate it.
  • were unlikely to ever have the budget to cost justify the licensing fees associated with commercial EA tools, but that could definitely benefit from the decision support it offers.
• We felt that there was an opportunity to develop the tool (requirements and actual software contributions) in collaboration with a broader EA community.  
• There were no English-language open source tools available at that time.

But obviously EAS is a business, we didn’t do this solely to benefit the EA community!  The commercial opportunity for us was in providing services that would help organisations take full advantage of the tool (EA capability development) as well as raising our profile to the general EA community and potential customers.  

So, to summarise, we couldn’t find a tool to meet our needs, so we developed our own based on our principles and philosophy towards EA (taking what we believed to be an novel approach) and launched it as a free, open source tool.
As a result we hope to:

• Aid those that may not yet, or ever, be in a position to justify buying a commercial EA tool
• Give the EA Community the opportunity to contribute their requirements, and extensions (if they so desire)
• Not just tell, but show everyone what EAS as an organisation is all about

It’s the end of the first full year of operation for Essential and ‘every day and in every way, it’s getting better and better’ – sorry, couldn’t resist a bit of plagiarism from the Pink Panther film I watched last night!

Back to the review of 2010…..

For Essential, 2010 built on the success of 2009 with almost 3,500 downloads of the toolkit, some 17,500 unique visitors from across a wide range of geographic locations from the UK and Europe across the US and Canada to Australia and India, really a worldwide reach.  The total number of times the toolkit has been downloaded since launch is now around the 6,000 mark.  We are delighted that the community is now really starting to take off; with around 1200 members we are beginning to see an active forum with ideas and suggestions as well as queries, and members starting to post answers to queries from other members, which is great.  Essential has also been noticed by all the major analyst firms with positive written reviews and mentions at various conferences, again, all good news.

Away from Essential, and looking at EA in general, the year has been a mixed one.  Obviously the recession had taken its toll on budgets and whilst some forward thinking organisations were looking to their EA teams to lead the way into the future, others had followed the more traditional route of cuts. However, although it looked like 2010 might just be the year of the recovery – the squeezing of government spend, particularly across Europe, will surely have a significant effect on the public sector and their EA initiatives.  This is possibly one of the reasons that Essential has been so successful, organisations around the world are really needing to make the most of the budget they have available and a decent, free tool is too good an opportunity to ignore.

In the more general world of Enterprise Architecture we have noticed a number of areas being discussed, perhaps more than others.  In terms of activities, there have been two that have been mentioned many times, one looking at application portfolio rationalisation and cost savings and one looking at the role of business architecture in EA.

The first is always a popular route in for an organisation new to EA – display some decent cost savings in a short time period and you will get people’s attention and, hopefully, the buy-in and visibility to move onwards and upwards with your EA; especially applicable in these times.

The second, music to my ears!  As a business architect I have long been frustrated by the IT tag that EA has had and the prominence of the application and technology layers.  It has always been my belief that the business has to be an integral part of the EA and so I was delighted to see so much discussion at conferences and in blogs and discussion threads about the importance of business capabilities, understanding the business strategy and ensuring this is linked into the EA.  This has to be a good thing and I will be happy when all EA teams are sitting under the CIO and not the CTO – although I accept this may not be in 2011?

Looking at EA trends, it has been suggested that specific frameworks will become less important as organisations become more fluid.  That is not to say that EA does not need structure, just that there will be less reliance on being aligned to one particular framework.  We also noticed that TOGAF seems to be rising in prominence since the launch of TOGAF9, partly, I suspect, as it focuses more on the business than the previous versions – although it is still not business focused enough in my opinion…

In terms of tools, there was much discussion about a ‘new generation of tools’ that would support more mature EA objectives such as strategic planning, IT road mapping and risk management.  This would be a move away from the objective of some of the current tools, which is simply to provide documentation support.  There was also some discussion about the use of ontology’s in EA Tools.  Both of these are areas of particular interest to us.  We think we have the most advanced use of an EA ontology in an available tool at present – and thanks to all those who have championed us in various blogs! From our perspective, the main value of an EA tool is not purely in modelling but of being able to interrogate the information that has been captured in the model to aid decision-making.

All in all an interesting year, and one that leaves us looking forward to 2011 when we have a number of exiting events planned.  Our first training course will take place in January, to enlarge the EAS network of Essential trained affiliates, and we have two major releases planned.  Firstly the Strategy Management piece has just been released in late December and secondly a complete update to the information and data layer is nearing completion and will be released early in the New Year.  Keep your eye on the site for these as they move the capabilities of Essential Architecture Manager on a good deal.  And finally an apology for all those that signed up for the webinar last year, we had to move this down our list of priorities as we simply ran out of available bandwidth to complete it in time.  We hope to be able to pick this up in 2011 once the training and the release of the update packs are completed.

All that’s left to say is thank you all for your support, have a very Happy Christmas and we look forward to collaborating with you in 2011!

It occurred to me recently that our approach to Essential Viewer, and the Views in particular, is just like what Apple have done with the iPhone / iPad and the Apps.

Where Apple were particularly disruptive in the smart-phone market was their approach to the Apps. Yes, they provided a number of useful Apps with the iPhone, but by providing a platform for people to create their own Apps backed by the App Store where these Apps can be shared, they totally changed the game of what it was to be a smart-phone.

In contrast, the established manufacturers had been creating smart-phones and all the ‘apps’ that you might want for them and it was difficult (compared to iPhone) to get additional applications for your phone. Even with Symbian-based devices, which of course is an open-source mobile device platform, it appeared to be harder for people to create their own applications, when we compare those to the sheer volume of 3rd party Apps that are available for iPhone.

Clearly Apple had the benefit of many years of early-adopter hindsight as to what does and what does not work on smart phones. However, I think that when they combined the open (if somewhat governed) platform with the infrastructure to easily acquire Apps and an innovative approach to what it was to be an App, then it all came together. Most Apps are very focussed on specific tasks and can therefore be small, easy to develop and easy to maintain and so if the App doesn’t do what someone needs, rather than extend it and bloat, they create a new App that just does that new function.

This is very analogous to the approach that we have taken with the Essential Viewer and the Views. I’m not sure that describing the Viewer as a toolkit (as I did until recently!) does it justice. The Viewer is a platform that enables focussed, often small and lightweight, Views to be rapidly assembled to meet the specific requirements that you have for presenting analysis, decision support, insights etc. about your architecture in a way that is clear and makes sense to your stakeholders.

Typically, we find that ‘architects’ Views do not make the impact you would expect on business users. We need different Views for different stakeholders.

Like Apple’s approach with the Apps (compared to the established manufacturers), rather than try to build and deliver all the Views that our Community could possibly want, The Essential Project provides the platform for you to assemble your own Views using standard web-development tools of your choice, based on HTML and XML/XSL.

Of course, we will continue to produce Views that will be included in the growing suite that is bundled with the Essential Viewer. But, we don’t want to be holding any one back in terms of their View requirements! One of the founding principles of The Essential Project is that it’s about providing capability.

Continuing the iPhone App analogy, we want the Community area of the Essential Project website to be the ‘View Store’. We’ve had some great contributions on the software components side and the goal is that members of the Essential Community can share, contribute and download new Views via this website.

We’re always looking at how we can improve the Viewer platform to make it easier to assemble views. We are increasingly finding that we’re creating little template components that do specific tasks (e.g. render the name of an element when given its Instance ID) and I think that such View components would also be very valuable when shared in the ‘View Store’.

So, if the Views are Apps, the Essential Viewer is an iPhone or iPad, then the Essential Project Community website is the App Store.

Happy View building!

This is a question that we realise potential users of the Essential Project tools are asking. In particular when the architecture team has spent many years trying to get to grips with technology diversity, it can be somewhat embarrassing – or even not an option – to have to go off-piste to use an enterprise architecture management tool!

The simple answer to this question is, however, “no”.

You do not have to use Apache Tomcat to use Essential Architecture Manager.

From the outset, we designed the Essential Architecture Manager software so that it can run on any platform – both operating system and application server – to provide as much flexibility in the prerequisites as possible. This means that Essential can fit into as many existing technology architectures as possible, taking advantage of existing technology platforms wherever possible.

The same question can be posed to the choice of relational database software for multi-user installations. Again, as we can see from the software architecture model, where a range of JDBC-compliant databases can be used, Essential can fit into your existing technology architecture, taking advantage of your standard database platform.

If I don’t have to use Apache Tomcat, what else can I use?

You can use any Java Servlet engine or J2EE application server as the runtime platform for Essential Viewer, which is packaged as a standard Java WAR file. This gives you the freedom to deploy and run Essential Viewer on a range of application servers such as Oracle AS, IBM WebSphere or JBoss.

Since the Essential Project is a free, open-source toolset, we have focussed on application servers and database platforms that are also available free and open-source. The available documentation covers these free platforms as we find that most of our users – certainly the initial stages of using Essential – use these platforms. However, in the spirit of open-source and applying this to our documentation we would welcome any documentation contributions from users who have experience to share about deploying the Essential Viewer WAR to alternative Java application servers.

What about the installer?

The Essential Project takes advantage of a number of other open-source toolkits and the installation process involves adding plugins or components to these other open source tools, e.g. Protege and Tomcat. The first releases of Essential did not include an automated installer but we provided detailed documentation for the installation process – including troubleshooting – and this documentation is applicable to other Java application servers.

In order to make the installation process as simple as possible, the automated installer checks the locations of the Protege and Application Server that you specify to help ensure that the Essential components are being installed in the correct places. Although the installer does not assume that Tomcat is being used (despite the messages on the installer windows!), it does assume that the target application server holds its web applications in a folder called ‘webapps’ – which is what Tomcat does.

This means that if the installer cannot find a folder called webapps in the location that you’ve specified for the Application Server, the installer will not proceed.

It is not really practical to cover all the variations of Application Server deployment approaches, so currently a work-around for anyone who is not using Tomcat is to create a ‘webapps’ folder in your Application Server and install the Essential Viewer WAR to there.

Perhaps the other approach is to relax the error-checking in the installer and allow the Essential Viewer WAR to be installed to any folder on the target environment? This places more responsibility on the user of the installer to install the WAR to the correct location but also provides them with more flexibility.

Either way, if you have any problems installing any of the Essential Project components, please contact us. Free support is always available through the forums.

I would be very interested to hear any views on the how to strike this balance in the installer.

The BCS kindly invited us to present a session on Open Source Enterprise Architecture Toolkits, covering their effect on the market place, at their meeting on Tuesday.  Alex Mayall led the presentation, which focussed on the two major open source offerings, Essential and Iteraplan, as well as touching on a few others.  The feedback from the audience was extremely positive, and the slides can be downloaded from the BCS website if anyone is interested.

There were a couple of questions from the audience on the use of Essential and I thought I would cover them here in case they are issues that are encountered often.  Firstly, one member advised that they had successfully downloaded Essential and were able to add data using the forms, but that they had a lot of data in excel spreadsheets and they had trouble finding the relevant documentation on the site to enable them to successfully run the import, limiting their use of the tool.  We have had a number of queries regarding this issue on the forum also and so we have recently added a tutorial – How to Write Integration Transforms – which is found in the Getting Started Tutorials.  If you have experienced problems in this area it may be worth a look.

Another member reported making constructive use of Essential, but finding creating new reports quite taxing.  There is a tutorial on this also – Creating New Reports – in the Reporting and Analysing Tutorials, however, it is fairly complex and we are considering writing a training module in this subject.  It would be good to gauge interest in this, so if you think you would be interested in attending such a course please let us know by commenting on this blog.  If you are having trouble in this area, it might be worth checking the forums to see if anyone esle has posted about a similar problem, or posting a question yourself.

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