The Essential Architecture Manager is a toolset that is focused solely on supporting enterprise architecture practices, applied in the context of a variety of business and IT management processes (e.g. strategy management, IT governance, solution delivery, service delivery). In addition, particular emphasis has been placed on creating a toolset that is:

• low maintenance, in terms of both the architecture model and the underlying tool platform
  
• easy to learn, flexible and intuitive to non-technical users
  
• capable of yielding results in days or weeks, rather than months.

The toolset offers all the required features of an enterprise architecture tool as defined by the Gartner Group*:-

• A repository
• A metamodel that supports business, information and technology viewpoints as well as the solution architecture
• Provides support within the repository for relationships among and between the objects in the above viewpoints and solution architecture
• The ability to create or import models and artefacts
• The ability to extract repository information to support various stakeholder needs.

• Essential Modeller, providing support for capturing and maintaining the enterprise architecture model
  
• Essential Viewer, responsible for generating reports that allow users to view and analyse the enterprise architecture model.
  

Context of Essential Architecture Manager

Open Source Software

In the best traditions of open source, the components of the Essential Architecture Manager have been created using a number of well-established and proven open source technologies.

High Level Software Architecture

Essential Modeller

At the heart of the Essential Modeller is the Protege Ontology Editor and Knowledge Repository (optionally supported by an RDBMS such as MySQL). By using Protege to define an ontology that represents the Essential Meta-Model and creating a number of custom-built Protege extensions, the Essential Modeller provides a simple, primarily form-based means of capturing, managing and sharing an enterprise architecture model.

Essential Modeller Screenshots

Essential Viewer

The Essential Viewer is a java-based web application that runs on any standard Java server platform (e.g. Apache Tomcat). It provides a flexible and extensible means of generating views on the model captured using the Essential Modeller. A number of standard reports are provided by default, however, the Essential Viewer is explicitly designed to allow organisations to define and publish custom views and reports to meet their individual needs.

Essential Viewer Screenshots

Tutorials

A range of tutorials that provide practical guidance on the use of the Essential Architecture Manager are available in the Tutorials Section.