Sparx Systems

 McKinsey Survey Report:

More than 40 percent of Enterprise Architects say that the business leaders in their companies are not aware of what the EA group does.

Gartner's report on Critical Capabilities for Enterprise Architecture Tools

Enterprise Architecture tools deliver true value ONLY when the broader organization can use the information that architects and others enter collaboratively for analysis and decision support.

TOGAF Version 9.2

By communicating with stakeholders early and frequently, the architecture team can ensure that they fully understand the architecture process, and the benefits of Enterprise Architecture; this means they can support the architecture team more actively when necessary.

These snippets perfectly convey why it’s critical to be transparent at an organization level when it comes to Enterprise Architecture. A transparent architecture practice can lead the organization

• to align business and IT leaders
• make smarter decisions faster
• be proactive in mitigating risks
• be agile at times of disruption

and ultimately lead to achieving its vision.

You might have felt that it’s important to make real-time architecture information available to the right audience at the right time while using Enterprise Architect (EA) for the following:

So, in this article, we bring you the top 4 highly successful ways how EA users in large organizations use Sparx Systems Prolaborate to share models online.

4 Ways to Share EA Models Online

Share to Collaborate

This is the most ideal way to share your Enterprise Architecture information with a long-term perspective. While it’s important to make live EA models readily available, it is equally important to enable collaboration.

Collaboration is crucial in making your Enterprise Architecture efforts a success and lead your organization to the future state you have envisioned. The target audience is the EA stakeholders who want to be part of the larger vision of the organization.

View short videos and case studies

Share with Different Teams or Customers

The objective here is to create simple self-service portals that make valuable information in your Enterprise Architect models available to the whole organization.

Although Share to Collaborate is the ideal way, we have seen many organizations which just want to share EA models most simply and cost-effectively.

The target audience are all users whom you want to constantly update on the progress of your Enterprise Architecture efforts; this can be different customers for whom you are working for or different teams in your organization with whom you want to share frequent updates.

View short videos and case studies

Instant Share

The goal here is make live information from your Enterprise Architect models available to anybody in the organization around the globe instantly.

The target audience can be anybody in the organization who want to get access to live information as quickly as possible.

Let’s say you are done with a business process and want to quickly share it with your team to check their thoughts. All you do is a single click and share the link with them. It’s as simple as that!

View short videos and case studies

Share in Confluence / SharePoint

In the recent past, majority of the organizations have moved away from file-based documents to online knowledge management platforms like Confluence and, SharePoint

And obviously, information from Enterprise Architect models which were being shared in files through various apps have been actively replaced by these platforms.

Whilst these platforms reduce the overheads in sharing documents, it still involves significant efforts from architects to manually update the contents in these pages.

View short videos and case studies

Further topics to explore:

• How to evaluate Prolaborate?
• How Prolaborate exactly works?
• How to get started with Prolaborate?

If you have any questions on the sharing ways, trial, or Proof of Concept, feel free to submit your questions using this form or email your queries to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Beta Now Available to Registered Users

Try out a rich new palette of tools, new ways to integrate your systems, visual improvements, team customizations, governance, accessibility, collaboration and deployment options.

Read more about the enhancements coming version 15.1 at:
www.sparxsystems.com/ea151

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Use manual entry or the power of online services from Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud to translate model information into many different languages.

Lock down your model with group based perspectives.

Model Baselines can now be configured to use a Reusable Asset Server (RAS).

Hide, show and filter diagram content on demand with the new Diagram Layers.

EA Best Practice Days, 2020: Modeling the digital future together

Today’s “digital economy” makes it essential to collaborate and deliver innovative model-based solutions, across the organization and throughout the entire software life cycle. Sparx Systems Central Europe is hosting EA Best Practice Days in March 2020, under the motto: "Modeling the digital future together". This event will offer practice-related discussions to develop competencies across the enterprise.

3 days full of best practice and interaction

Location: Stuttgart, Germany.

Dates:

• German-Speaking: 17th-19th March
• English-Speaking: 18th-19th March

Don't miss this chance to join with other modelers to learn and share how Enterprise Architect is being used to solve business problems. There's a wide range of international speakers and topics, plus a preview of the latest Enterprise Architect v15 features.

Learn more: https://www.sparxsystems.eu/bestpractice-days-eng/

Governance, Risk Management and Compliance

Good governance helps guide good decision making for public organizations and companies. This helps to provide transparent decision making, that adheres to relevant government legislation, providing a safe and fair environment for the end-users of the designed systems.

There are numerous advantages of using Enterprise Architect to model the strategy within a repository and link that strategic direction and executive thinking to the processes, architectures, software and capabilities that are being directed and then modeled. This is a highly effective and powerful means of ensuring that strategic direction is followed and tied to the fundamental infrastructure and direction of an enterprise.

This white paper provides an insight into using Enterprise Architect for implementing governance directives, risk management and ensuring there is compliance to these directives and any external standards.

2019 Sparx Systems Award at Federation University

Federation University, School of Science, Engineering and Information Technology holds an annual student awards ceremony, in which industry partners play a crucial role in supporting and encouraging our students to achieve greatness in their desired field.

Scott Hebbard, Sparx Systems Communications Manager recently had the pleasure of presenting the Sparx Systems award at a Federation University Student awards ceremony. The Sparx Systems Award in 2019 was presented to Drew McMahon.

Drew regularly used Enterprise Architect throughout his degree and he indicated “As a programmer and designer, I find the tool comprehensive and invaluable, and I'm thrilled to have continued access with my own licence. I'm grateful that Sparx Systems would support Federation University and the School of Science, Engineering, and Information Technology.”

Sparx Systems would like to congratulate Drew on his hard work and dedication to his studies.

Information about the Award recipient:

Drew has achieved excellent results throughout his degree and his dedication, perseverance and commitment to excellence were an inspiration to us all.

He has the top grade point average of 7 and an average final result of 94.24% across all his courses. He is easy to work with and shows maturity in his organisational skills and attention to understanding the latest technology.

Drew has embraced opportunities to extend his knowledge beyond his degree studies, for example attending an intensive bootcamp training course in Salesforce development during the lecture break in 2018.

This was undertaken during Drew’s final semester of study when he was very busy with finalising his internship with IBM and completing his final year project.

Drew is a very worthy recipient of this award and an exemplar of an upcoming IT professional.

Sparx Systems is pleased to announce a new Sparx Systems University Week scheduled June 3^rd-7^th.

During Sparx Systems University week, a range of both free and paid training sessions are hosted at training locations around the world and online.  All sessions are supported by Sparx Service providers and qualified trainers in a number of different languages.

This week-long event is a unique opportunity to gain knowledge and improve skills around Enterprise Architect. June's course line-up covers a broad range of topics, and has been developed with both introductory and advanced users in mind.

The Toolbox is an often-essential part of the Enterprise Architect interface. There are several ways to bring up the Toolbox in Enterprise Architect. This tutorial will cover all 4 of them.

1. Via the Ribbon

Ribbon > Design > Diagram > Toolbox.

2. Using Shortcut Keys

Pressing Alt+5 displays the Diagram Toolbox.

3. Pressing the Space Bar

Brings up the Diagram Toolbox in-place via a context sensitive menu.

4. Switching between Docked Dialogues

If you like to dock the Toolbox and Project Explorer together in the same spot, the guillemets arrow can allow you to swap back and forth between the two.

P.S. A quick note about Perspectives...

Perspectives in Enterprise Architect are used to tailor toolsets for domain-specific modeling scenarios. So essentially, you can apply a Perspective to display functions/tools appropriate to the task you're performing and hide all the rest.

Sometimes people can't find the tool they're looking for because they have a perspective set and aren't aware. If you ever find yourself in this position, check the perspectives display down the bottom right of the program.

Then either select the new relevant perspectives required or set the perspective back to default by Perspective > Activate All.

Happy Modeling!

Digital transformation, new business models and the rapid pace of change have had a profound impact on the modern enterprise. Agile approaches can lead to faster feedback cycles, improved stakeholder engagement, reduced waste, improved transparency, predictable delivery and better business outcomes.

The Sparx Systems tool suite supports enterprise agility through better collaboration, strategic management, capability modeling, Kanban diagrams, user stories, integrated communication tools, project management features, traceability and much more.

Presented by Chris Armstrong and Scott Hebbard.

Register Today at:

https://www.sparxsystems.com/resources/webinar/partners/agile/enterprise/index.html

The 2019 ComponentSource Best Selling Awards have been announced for the year, and we are very pleased to report Sparx Systems has been named in the Top 25 Vendors. In a further nod from the company, Enterprise Architect Ultimate Edition made it to the Top 100 Products category.

According to a press release from the company, the awards are calculated using sales in USD $, which are then ranked to form a list and "represent a real world view of the products that are in demand and currently being bought by our global customers".

The ranking product Enterprise Architect Ultimate Edition is the most powerful edition of Enterprise Architect - enabling everything in Enterprise Architect and all MDG Extensions.

At Sparx Systems, our staff regularly use Enterprise Architect's inbuilt "Model Mail" throughout the day, sending messages regarding tasks and work items. The Business and Development staff alike use Model Mail to collaborate, and it has always been handy to link to what we're working on.

Functionality added in version 13.5 made it even simpler to link to model Artifacts. While modeling in context, users can simply right click on the Artifact in question, be it an Element, Package or Diagram Package, and select Collaborate -> Send Message to bring up a new Model Mail dialogue that includes a link to the Artifact embedded in the message body.

Context Menu -> Collaborate -> Send Message

A link to the Artifact and relevant Diagram is then visible in the message body.

It's that simple, and it can simplify your correspondence considerably.