Ability Engineering has recently added three new offerings to their Enterprise Architect training portfolio. 

The first new course is Enterprise Architect for teams. This is completely new content, distilled from many years of experience (and lessons learned the hard way) working in a range of organisations and with many different models. This training covers all the issues that an organisation needs to address in order to make its Enterprise Architect implementation successful.

EA for teams is a day long workshop which covers the practicalities of structuring your models and setting up your project team to work together effectively. Topics include:

• Sharing Enterprise Architect data
• Baselines, XMI and DIFFS
• Reference Data
• Reusable Asset Service
• Security
• Harvesting
• Scripts
• MDGs
• Organisation and Roles
• Rolling out Enterprise Architect

EA in a Day

The EA in a Day format has been developed in response to customer demand, to rapidly bring team members up to speed to focus on a particular technique and how to model it in Enterprise Architect. There are currently two 'flavours' of EA in a Day:

1. EA in a Day: Use Cases

This course covers Best Practice in Use Case modelling using Structured Scenarios. Using examples and exercises, delegates learn how to build 'fully dressed' use cases and some common bear traps to avoid. In the afternoon delegates are then hands on in Enterprise Architect, modelling their morning's work.

2. EA in a Day: BPMN 2.0

This course looks at the technique of business process modeling: when to use it, how to do it, and what tools to use. It doesn’t try to teach everything about BPMN – there’s just too much to take in at one sitting, so we cover a workable, practical sub-set. With examples and exercises to reinforce the concepts.

Using the results of the exercises completed in the morning, we then explore the BPMN 2.0 implementation in Enterprise Architect, model the processes and discover hints and tips to make our analysis clear and, where appropriate, re-useful.

For a full list of Ability Engineering training options, plus details of content and pricing, visit http://www.abilityengineering.co.uk/index.php/training

Your last chance!. .. to meet and share experiences with other Enterprise Architect users and experts in Toronto, Canada on April 23/24

KPMG are hosting two days of great content at their downtown offices, featuring leading Business Analysts and Enterprise Architects across many industries.

There will also be an opportunity to meet Tom O'Reilly, COO of Sparx Systems plus several Global Sparx Partner organisations, who will be there to give insight and best practice advice.  

LAST FEW TICKETS AVAILABLE - so don't miss out on this great opportunity.

Visit http://www.in2grateit.com/EANorthAmerica/TorontoEARegistration.pdf to reserve your place TODAY.

Have you ever been to a meeting that was a waste of time?

Do some of your meetings end without the result you need? Or with no result at all?

Having the right information available at the right time in the right format would make everything so much easier.

 Everyone better prepared

• Less confusion over what's required
• Fewer poor decisions made
• Less time wasted
• A clear direction mapped out.

Enterprise Architect gives users access to the all the right information at the right time, and it’s simple to format it all to make meetings really productive.

So here are ten top tips to make your project meetings smarter.

Additional document creation options from your Enterprise Architect model are now available with the release of the eaDocX v3.4 beta.

 This latest eaDocX release allows you to:

- construct documents and document sections based on your model views

- use instance classifiers just like any other relationship to provide new document structures

- work with EA scripts to deliver even more tailored document formatting options

- plus other customer requested enhancements

eaDocX v3.4 is compatible with EA v11.

Read more and download a free trial at www.eadocx.com

Join Us On April 23 and 24 2014

We are delighted to announce the second Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect North America conference.

With dedicated tracks for Business Analysts and Enterprise Architects, the 2 days will provide valuable content from speakers across industries and countries, plus networking opportunities, to help you deliver improved productivity from your use of Enterprise Architect. Book Now!

KPMG LLP, a key sponsor for this event, is hosting the conference at their Toronto headquarters office.

Click here for more information or to make a reservation.

Call for Speakers:

A few opportunities still remain for speakers to share their productivity and project stories. We'd love for you to join us, but note that the closing date for speaker submissions is February 28th, so don't delay.  Click here if you wish to be a speaker.

Call for Conference Partners:

We are also happy to invite Sparx Systems Global Partners to join us at this event. Click here if you wish to be a conference partner.

See you there!

On 5 February 2014, the next European EA User Group event will take place in Utrecht. This Enterprise Architect event is for professionals who work with this tool and want to share knowledge to use EA more effectively.

Are you interested in how you can use EA for your role or organization? How EA can be used in combination with other tools? What the important tips and tricks are from the use of EA?

We have lined up a range of speakers to appeal to many different disciplines who can use Enterprise Architect, such as project management, architecture, requirements management, development and testing.View the full agenda, including presentations in English and Dutch.

This event is taking place at the headquarters of NS, who are pleased to welcome the European EA User Group. Sign up at www.eausergroup.com and join us on 5 February in Utrecht.

Op 5 februari 2014 wordt het Europese EA User Group evenement georganiseerd in Utrecht. Dit Enterprise Architect event is voor alle professionals die werken met deze tool en kennis willen opdoen om EA nog effectiever in te kunnen zetten.

De sprekers op deze dag zullen  verschillende disciplines aanspreken die gebruik kunnen maken van Enterprise Architect, zoals projectmanagement, architectuur, requirements management, ontwikkeling en test.   

Ben je geïnteresseerd op welke manier je EA kan inzetten voor jou rol of organisatie? Hoe je EA kan gebruiken in combinatie met andere tools? Wat de belangrijke tips&tricks zijn van het gebruik van EA?

Meld je dan aan via www.eausergroup.com zodat we je op 5 februari in Utrecht op het Hoofdkantoor van NS kunnen verwelkomen op de Europese EA User Group. 

On October 8th, 2013
in Nuremberg, Germany,

you are invited to join the next

European EA User Group event.

This gives EA Users in Central Europe the best opportunity this year to learn, share and explore Enterprise Architect best practice.

The venue is the RInghotel Loeuw's Merkur in the heart of Nuremberg.

Building on the experience gained at our hugely successful London event in May, the day will include a range of speakers, workshops and exhibits.
Choose sessions from any of the 3 tracks of content:

• Track 1 - Systems Engineering Focus (in German)
• Track 2 - Business Analyst Focus (in German)
• Track 3 - English stream (including presentations on TOGAF, MDGs, and User stories to inspire and encourage wider adoption of EA in your organisation)

With many speakers and topics unique to this event, and supported by Sparx Systems, this is an event not to be missed. 

The registration fee of just 97€ will provide you with access to practical EA knowledge and experience, lunch and refreshments!
Visit www.eausergroup.com to find out more and book your place.

PS. There are only 150 places available, and they are selling fast, so to make sure that you don't miss this great opportunity, BOOK NOW.

We're pleased to announce the release of eaDocX v3.3, making it even easier to integrate your EA analyses directly into Word and Excel with no need for scripting.

New features include: 
- Support for Word and Excel 2013 
- Model Expert: a graphical tool to help you understand the structure of your EA model 
- Even better Quick documents to create a Word document of any package in your model in just 2 clicks 
- Phone home - to keep you up to date with latest releases 
- More configurable options for your documents 
- Define your own Word Table styles 
- and a whole load of other customer requests 

For more information and a free 30 day trial visit www.eadocx.com

This White Paper looks at ways to transform our project documents, helping readers to find and use information that is relevant to them. 

In both Waterfall and Agile developments, excellent documents can improve project quality and give new insights. New document capabilities allow authors to create high quality, accurate and targeted documents, and allow readers to navigate their way through them in an intuitive way. 

By storing information in EA, and using eaDocX, approaches are described that can bring our project communications into the 21st Century.  Documents which:

- contain only content which is relevant to the reader

- provide a range of presentation styles 

- engage and hold the reader's attention

- guide the reader as to where they should concentrate their attention

- give the reader freedom to navigate the document’s contents as they wish

This White Paper examines how using EA to model relationships delivers end-to-end traceability, and looks at how we can use those relationships to bring our documents to life.

One of the strengths of Enterprise Architect is that we can use it to capture the full range of project ideas.  Not just individual requirements and their priorities, but user stories and use cases, classes and components, test plans and test cases. And we can also capture how those ideas change over time, by keeping risks, issues and actions, which tell the story of the project, in EA as well. Connecting all these ideas together can deliver the traceability which our stakeholders need.

Using eaDocX it is simple to create documents that reveal these relationships and allow new insights.  In this way we can make the richness of our models available to all our stakeholders.