• Home
• About
• Downloads
• Documentation
• Community
• Services

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.

You may not be surprised to learn that I have been following this discussion with some interest!  I agree with the reasons given by various members of the thread for the lack of tool uptake; an organisation should have a process and methodology embedded before it can select a tool; the tool needs to support the objectives of the organisations EA, therefore these must be known before tool selection; many EA tools are either poorly constructed or were designed for something else, i.e. BPM, and have been adapted to EA; the organisation itself is not sufficiently mature; to name but a few, and I was very pleased to see that The Essential Project received a couple of mentions.

Firstly David Baker pointed out that using free, open source tools as a starting point would seem like a good idea and he wondered why more organisations didn’t do this, speculating that data migration at a later date might be the issue.  To deal with this particular point, Essential does have a data export option, so if an organisation starts with Essential and decides that it doesn’t suit its needs once it has defined its exact requirements, the data can easily be migrated to the tool of choice.

Later in the discussion Ric Phillips noted that ‘A good enterprise architecture will allow flexible modelling (primary ontology) that can allow architects to build rich (hyper-connected) models of the actual organisations in which they work – which do not always conform to the grammar and lexicon of the big frameworks’, and that uncoupling the presentation and analysis layers from the data layer is possible and desirable.  He points out (thanks very much!) that The Essential Project is the only EA Tool currently to take this approach.  He also notes that the ontology is relatively easy to modify, again something we felt was important, however, personally I would be cautious about his idea to throw away the ontology and build your own from scratch.  Obviously this is doable (we have done it!) but it is by no means a trivial exercise and in the best traditions of EA and reusability it seems hasty to throw it away and start again!

The tool debate is an interesting one in terms of when an organisation should start to use a tool, as obviously it is crucial to understand the business problem that your EA is to solve and what is required of your tool before you make an investment.  However, in practice a tool would often be useful fairly early on in the process, before any such investment would be prudent, and this is precisely where and why Essential was born, to give many of the benefits of a traditional tool, much beyond the capability of Visio or Excel, without the investment required of a traditional tool.

When people find out that we’re using Protege as a part of Essential Architecture Manager, a common question is whether we will, or why we don’t currently, use OWL.

OWL is an open-standard language from W3C for describing ontologies – the Web Ontology Language. This uses RDF (another XML language for describing resources that is often used to capture the contents of a repository) to store the Protege repository – both classes and individuals (as instances are known in Protege OWL).

There’s a lot of work currently going on in the OWL space, developing standard ontologies for particular domains, producing advanced reasoners to use the ontologies and so on.

The Protege Project is heavily involved in supporting these ontology initiatives and indeed, currently Protege 4 only supports OWL ontologies. I had some concerns about this but have been assured by the Protege Team that Protege Frames is still very much part of the Protege roadmap and the continued development of Protege 3 demonstrates this.

So, why not use OWL for Essential Architecture Manager?

This is a question we asked ourselves several years ago and we took some time to understand which approach best supported our requirements. The advice on the Protege Project website was a key part of making this decision – our requirements very neatly matched the description of the Frames-based ontology.

Some seem to contend that unless you are using OWL, you are not working on an ontology. This is not the case. It’s the semantics, the types (classes) of things, the actual things and the relationships between the classes and things that are what makes an ontology.

With Essential Architecture Manager, we are not trying to create a universal or standard ontology for the Enterprise Architecture of all organisations. Rather, by using Essential Architecture Manager, you are building an ontology about your organisation. We find it helpful to think about the Essential Meta Model as a partially-populated ontology, like the trunk and branches of a tree, and by modelling your enterprise in Essential, you are adding the leaves to the tree.

In this way, everyone who uses Essential is creating a different ontology. However, they are using the same language to build or complete that ontology. The Essential Meta Model provides a Domain Specific Language for Enterprise Architecture that users of Essential are able to use to build the ontology of their enterprise architecture.

Using the same DSL means that details of these ontologies can be shared, exchanged, reasoned on, etc. using a shared set of tools and shared semantics.

It’s the instances of the ontology that are specific to each ‘enterprise’ but the classes and types – the meta model – that are ‘standard’ across all Essential deployments.

We realise that many existing users of Protege are getting great benefits from using OWL but in addition to the better ‘fit’ of Frames to our knowledge base requirements, the simplicity and ease of use of Protege Frames is very important to the Essential Project.

By supplying an extensive class hierarchy in the Essential Meta Model, users of the Essential Project are somewhat different from many typical Protege users in that they do not need to start with Class modelling. Rather, they pick up the Class hierarchy and start creating instances. The Protege Forms make this very clear and straight-forward, so users are able to get on with ‘adding the leaves’ to the ontology. There is no need to know anything about ontologies or ontology development to use and get the benefits of Essential Architecture Manager.

This also means that we can clearly and easily separate the development of the Essential Meta Model class-hierarchy from the modelling activity – creating instances of those classes. Indeed, we normally hide the Classes tab in a multi-user configuration to reinforce this separation. The main activities in using Essential are about creating and relating instances. Designing and creating new classes is something to be approached when the out-of-the-box meta model needs to be extended – not as part of the day-to-day use of Essential.

By focussing on describing the details (the Instances) of the organisation – current, planned or future – rather than on how to describe (the Classes) the organisation, the benefits of enterprise architecture can be realised very quickly. During our consulting engagements, we’ve seen clients spend months defining their own detailed meta model before getting started on using this meta model. By picking up the Essential Meta Model – and extending it where and when required – we’ve seen clients gain real benefits of EA and EA tools in the same timeframe that others are still defining their meta model.

For those who are interested in OWL and Essential, Protege provides the capability to export the Essential Architecture Manager repositories in OWL format, preserving the class-hierarchy and the properties of these classes. This export could provide a starting point for those who are interested in using the Essential Meta Model ontology as a starting point for OWL-based activities.

I’d be really interested to hear about anyone’s experience doing just this.

My colleague, Jon Carter, and I have just come back from attending a TOGAF 9 training course – and I was pleasantly surprised on two counts.

Firstly, the course was excellent; it really brought TOGAF 9 to life as it was focused on how to apply it in different organisations and scenarios, rather than a dry run through of its concepts with the aim of passing a test at the end – which was what I was, somewhat unsportingly maybe, expecting!

Secondly, I found TOGAF 9 to be a very useful framework in which to apply EA, obviously couched with all the usual warnings about having the right skills and knowledge to apply it, however the new focus on the business elements makes the framework eminently usable, and hopefully future versions of TOGAF will continue to expand the support for business architecture.

Whilst on the course Jon and I were also thinking about the compatibility between TOGAF 9 and Essential, and how effectively Essential can support organisations that are using TOGAF 9 as their EA framework.  I’m pleased to say that TOGAF 9 and Essential are, in fact, very compatible.  There are a few concepts within Essential that are not supported by TOGAF 9, and vice versa, as well as a few concepts that have slightly different meanings, primarily in the newer TOGAF 9 business layer.  For example, what we have described as a Business Capability in the Essential meta model is very closely aligned to what TOGAF 9 describes as a Business Function, however, these differences are very easily explained and in essence it would be very straightforward to use Essential to support an organisation using TOGAF 9 as its framework.

An area that struck both Jon and I where we are very closely aligned with TOGAF 9 is the definition and use of views and viewpoints.  TOGAF describes understanding each stakeholder’s concerns, defining the view of the architecture that they need to understand to satisfy their concern, and then building the viewpoint to produce this view.  In Essential we have always been very clear that information captured is done so to give the ability to provide decision support to all relevant roles. We have not provided an exhaustive list of pre-defined and coded reports that we think will satisfy all needs, as we are clear that each organisation not only has a different set of problems to solve, but that it will have different types of people solving the problems and therefore their needs and desires in terms of views required to provide decision support are different.  We have, therefore, designed the Essential knowledge base (the ontology) in such a way that once the information is captured, Essential can be used to rapidly define required views – and, in addition, we have developed Essential so that creating new views is relatively easy.   A new view will typically take 1-3 days to build depending on its complexity, and it then provides a template which can be used across various data sources, as opposed to a one off report.  We believe this supports TOGAF ideals well.

We do have plans to complete an Essential/TOGAF 9 mapping to cover how Essential could be used to support TOGAF 9, and propose to produce a mapping, rather than any alterations to Essential, as we do want to remain framework independent.

All in all a very valuable four days spent.

We are considering our next steps for The Essential Toolkit, for example which extensions and upgrades should we concentrate on, and also for The Essential Project, for example should we concentrate on providing training, and if so in what form, community involvement etc.  We thought that a webinar might be a good idea to allow us to get the views from the community rather than us trying to best guest what is required.

Sometime ago we published a roadmap showing the key areas of development for Essential and our current idea of the requirements within each, however, it is not the intention to use this as a detailed plan, rather as an area where ideas and requirements are logged.  We would like the community to be key in adding to the requirements and setting the priorities for completion.  We have already completed a number of these, but we would now like your feedback in adding to the requirements and then prioritising them.

We are in the process of defining an accreditation process, the intention being to make it easier for users who want some external support to ensure that they are getting it from a source that has Essential expertise.  However, it has always been in our plans to offer some form of training on Essential and, again, we would love your feedback on the kind of training you would find useful.  For example, should the training address a specific architecture capability, such as ‘how to use Essential to manage the complexity and cost efficiency of my application portfolio’ or ‘How to use Essential to define my strategic IT architecture and create a transition plan’?  Or should we concentrate on a particular architecture layer, for example, giving a detailed understanding of the application architecture layer?   How would you like to receive the training, for example, onsite or offsite training courses, downloadable training packs, webinar courses etc?  There are numerous options and we want to ensure that we deliver what most suits your needs.

Additionally, we would love to hear what you have been using Essential for over the last year.  Your successes and also the issues and problems you have encountered, and we think an Essential Project webinar would be a great opportunity to do this.  We’re not looking for specific installation or technical issues, but a view of where Essential is providing value and areas that we need to concentrate on to ensure that it continues to add value in the coming years.  To that end, in addition to us presenting our roadmap and training thoughts, it would be great if a number of community members would be willing to speak about how they are using Essential, successes they have had and issues they have encountered, as well as any updates/extensions that they would like to see to make their lives easier.

For now, what we would really like to know is whether an Essential webinar would be of interest to you, whether you would like to attend such an event and whether you would be prepared to share your experiences with us and the community.  If you could spend a few seconds completing the poll on the left of the homepage it would be much appreciated.

Some time ago we applied to Trade Mark the Essential name and logo in both the UK and the EU.  It is a fairly long, but not very torturous, road and we are now delighted to announce that both applications were successful and Essential is now registered under a UK and a European Community Trade Mark.

This simply protects us from anyone else using the Essential name and logo to promote their own services. For example, a company could not offer training or consultancy in Essential Architecture Manager, using the Essential name and logo, without our agreement and permission.

We felt that, although we are naturally proud of our open source credentials and actively want to encourage people to download, use and customise Essential, we also want to be able to protect our brand and ensure that quality of any training or consulting services from 3rd parties is kept at a high standard.

To this end, we will shortly be introducing our accreditation process. Having demonstrated that they have the ability to ensure the required quality when delivering services such as consulting and training, accredited individuals or organisations will be able to quote the Essential name and brand. We will be publishing a list of accredited organisations on our website very soon.

It has been one year since we launched Essential.  We are delighted with the success of the project to date and thought we would share some of our successes with you, our Community.

To date there have been almost 3,000 downloads of the tool, with a steady monthly rate of approximately 240 downloads per month!  We released an update pack in November, which has been downloaded over 250 times, so we know that some, but not all of you, are keeping track of the updates.  The website receives over 2,500 visits each month, and approximately 600 of these are active users, those that visit on a regular basis.  We take this to mean that we have approximately 600 organisations that are using Essential Architecture Manager as their tool of choice, which we think is a real endorsement of not only the tool, but our free, open source approach.

Hopefully you will be aware that we have not been idle in our first year, and, at the request of you, the community, we have issued five updates via the ECP (Essential Community Process).  Most of these support modelling in the Business Layer, which gives us an indication of where most use is being made of Essential:-

• ECP1 – Capturing License Models
• ECP2 – Capturing Organisation Policy and Compliance
• ECP3 – Links to External References
• ECP4 – Strategy Management
• ECP5 – Skills Modelling in the Business Layer

In addition to the ECP’s, we released a number of updates to make Essential easier to use, some initiated by us and some, again, by you the community:-

• Essential Installer – a wizard based installer that simplifies the installation process, performing all the unpacking and installation of the Essential Project software components for both stand-alone and multi-user installations
• Essential Integration Tab – an easy to use means of providing source-data import and integration capabilities.
• Graphical Models in Reports – version 1.3 included snapshots of the graphical models defined in the Protégé modelling environment to be published to the Essential Viewer
• Demo Video
• Sample Repositories
• Pictorial Representation of the Meta Model

Another exciting development for us was receiving our first contributions from the Community; a Visio Export Tool, Import Scripts and an Enhancement to the Essential Viewer.  We hope that these will be the start of many more contributions over the next year as input from the Community grows.  And on a related note, it’s exciting to see that members of the Community have created and are sharing a patch for Protégé to make it work with Oracle as the database backend.

We are delighted that, after just one year, Essential appears to be making a real contribution to the life of many Enterprise Architects in many organisations, from large global corporations, government agencies and education establishments to smaller local companies, as evidenced by discussions on the forums and direct communications we have received.

Our aim for the next year is to continue to grow the Essential Project Community, to encourage you, the community members, to actively participate in discussions and debates surrounding the tool and Enterprise Architecture in general, and to enhance Essential Architecture Manager driven by your needs.

If you feel you have anything to contribute, be it software for the tool, advice about your use of Essential, successes and failures or information regarding EA in general, please make these available to all in the Community via the forums or blogs.

Many organisations embarking on EA modelling already have a wealth of information in a variety of disparate forms, such as presentations, drawing tools and most commonly in spreadsheets. Rather than re-key, or re-model all this work, shouldn’t we be able to exploit this existing information – lifting it directly – by importing it into Essential Architecture Manager?

Over the last few years, we have explored a variety of options for importing existing information into Protege (and therefore Essential Architecture Manager) and we realised that the only safe and reliable approach was to do this using the Protege API to add, remove and update information in the knowledge base in effectively the same was as the graphical user interface and let Protege take care of all the integrity issues as it does when you work with the forms. Using the Protege API is at the heart of the Essential integration tools.

The new Essential Integration tab plugin for Protege and Essential Architecture Manager simplifying the one-off ‘data load’ of things like your spreadsheets but also the on-going synchronisation of important data that is maintained in other systems. We’ve had some very good experience of doing this sort of synchronisation with configuration management databases and virtual server environment configurations.

This new tab is an evolution of the ‘skunk-works’ release of the Integration Server. We have made it into a tab to make it easier for both stand-alone and multi-user use (both modes are supported) and to make it easier to install and add this capability to your Essential Architecture Manager. The process of running an import or synchronisation is now much simpler than it was with the Integration Server.

The concept of the integration server will remain but will be re-worked to provide a means of automating imports and on-going synchronisations from other sources, e.g. on a scheduled daily basis. However, the new integration tab will be the most commonly used mechanism for importing information into Essential en-masse.

Getting information out of Essential to share with other systems is simply a matter of creating a suitable view for Essential Viewer, maybe an XML document or a CSV etc. With the contribution from Essential Project Community member, Mathwizard, this can be saved directly as an export file from Essential Viewer, using your browser.

So how to do you go about importing your spreadsheets, XML documents etc. using the integration tab?

As you might expect, XML is the ideal format for integrating the source information and the integration tab expects source data to be in XML format, so it is often easiest to work with an XML export of your source information.

The first step is to work out how this existing information will be represented in Essential. Unfortunately, there is no magic solution to this. You need to define how your source information maps to the Essential Meta Model and with this understanding define the transform that is required.

By the way, creating relationships and relationship classes during imports can be particularly tricky as the source information often does not represent the relationships in a way that can be mapped to the relationships in the Essential Meta Model. In many cases, it can be best to focus on importing the instances and then completing the relationships in Protege via the forms.

There are two approaches to defining the transform that I’ll explore in a moment. We intend to produce and share a library of transforms from common source formats into the baseline Essential Meta Model.

Currently, we have a transform for importing the XML representation of an Essential repository that Essential Viewer uses. This means that you can import elements from other Essential repositories, out of the box. Also, our previous experience with certain configuration management databases and virtual server environments mean that we can easily share transforms to import Technology Nodes and Technology Instances into Essential.

The two approaches to transforming your existing source information into the Essential Meta Model are:

1. Transform you existing source to XML using the Essential Viewer XML schema. Then import this resulting XML into Essential using the out-of-the-box Essential Repository transform. This approach is useful for once-off data loads from existing sources such as spreadsheets where it’s most important to get the main instances into Essential rather than complex relationships.
2. Define your own transform file and use this to have the integration tab transform your source information and import it into Essential. Although this may seem to be a more complex exercise than approach 1, you have more flexibility in defining how your source information maps to the Essential Meta Model. A how-to guide for writing transforms is being written at the moment that explains how the transforms work and the supporting tools that are available, e.g. a library of script functions that wrap the Protege API to support things like on-going synchronisation of instances in Essential with instances in other, external repositories.

We would be very happy to help anyone who needs to construct their own custom transform via the forums or even to undertake commissions to build custom transforms as required.

And of course, if you’ve built some transforms that you’d like to share with the Community, we would really like to add these to the Share area of the site.

Happy exploiting of your existing information!

We have been struck recently by the volume of articles and blogs regarding Business Capability modelling, many seemingly of the view that this is a new concept that will resolve the old business IT alignment issue.

Whilst we don’t concur with the view that the concept of business capabilities is either new or capable of resolving the alignment issue alone, we are in agreement that business capability modelling is a key aspect of the business architecture.

We view business capabilities as the ‘services’ that the business offers or requires.  In Essential, these capabilities are modelled in the Business Conceptual layer and represent what the business does (or needs to do) in order to fulfil its objectives and responsibilities.

A business capability is at a higher level than a business process.  It represents a conceptual service that a group of processes and people, supported by the relevant application, information and underlying technology, will perform.  The capability represents the what, whereas the process, people and technology represent the how.  Business Capabilities can themselves be broken down into supporting capabilities, if this is useful.

Defining your business capabilities is extremely useful as it allows you to take a step back and focus on the key elements of your organisation.  You can avoid getting bogged down in the details of ‘how’ things happen and concentrate on ‘what’ does (or needs to) happen.  Once you have done this it is possible to identify your key capabilities, for example, the ones that will differentiate your business and you can use this information to ensure that you focus on the areas of importance in your business, whether this is in defining new projects or ensuring business as usual delivers appropriately.

You will find that your business capabilities are relatively static because you are defining the ‘what’ which rarely changes whereas, for example, your business processes will constantly be evolving as the ‘how’ things are done changes all the time with the advancement of technology and of customer demand.  A very obvious example is retail – twenty years ago the internet did not exist so there were no online sales channels; but the capabilities of a retail channel have not altered, Sales, Fulfilment and Billing are still capabilities, however the process of ‘how’ they sell, dispatch and take payment has altered dramatically.

In reviewing our tutorials we noticed that we already have tutorials on Capturing the Business Value Chain (a subset of the capabilities) and Business Process Modelling, but we don’t have a tutorial that focuses solely on business capability modelling.  In view of the current interest we aim to address this gap as soon as we can and a new tutorial will be available shortly.

← Previous Page — Next Page →