A different approach to capturing your architecture

Essential Architecture Manager has been designed to be as easy to use as possible. However, it is rather different to many other modelling tools that you may have used. From our extensive practical experience of capturing architectural information in models, the very intuitive approach taken by the Protege team to knowledge capture and representation means that Protege provides an ideal platform for quickly getting relevant information into your repository. In Essential Architecture Manager, information is captured either through simple forms or through simplified graphical diagrams.

This tutorial introduces you to Protege and Essential Architecture Manager.

Separating the capture from the analysis and reporting

A fundamental principle of Essential Architecture Manager is that information about your architecture is captured separately from how you analyse and report on it.  This means that what you capture can be used and combined with other information (captured on other occasions and by other modellers) to answer not only the original questions that you had about your architecture but other questions that were not even considered when the information was captured. You can then focus on capturing what you know about a particular element of the architecture rather than 'modelling the report'.

It all joins up

The Essential Meta Model is at the heart of Essential Architecture Manager and has been designed and developed to provide a language for describing Enterprise Architecture that is able to answer questions of the model that it represents. The meta model manages all the complex relationships between the elements of the Enterprise Architecture whilst hiding the complexity of capturing these elements and relationships. Essential Architecture Manager enables you to capture these elements and relationships through simple views of the overall model - safe in the knowledge that what you capture will join up with all the other elements and relationships inside the repository.

Opening Essential Architecture Manager's modeller

Introducing Protege

Having completed your installation of Essential Architecture Manager you will have Protege installed. If you haven't already, you may wish to create a shortcut icon on your desktop for it. To get started with your Enterprise Architecture repository:

• Start Protege.  On Micrsoft Windows, you may see a black command prompt window Protege starts up. This can be disabled but is often useful and is best minimised for now.
• Welcome. When Protege has started, it presents a 'Welcome' dialog inviting you to open a recently accessed project. You can either select a recent file, click on 'open other' to select a file that is not listed, or click on 'new project' to start a new project.
• Open the Essential Architecture Manager repository. There are two ways in which Essential Architecture Manager is used. Stand Alone mode, where you work on the model on your own workstation, and Multi-User mode, where many people can access and work with a shared repository.
  

If you are working Stand Alone, simply use the "Open Other..." option to browse your files to where you have unpacked the Essential Meta Model. Select the file 'essential_baseline_v1.pprj' and Protege will open your Essential Architecture Manager repository.

If you are working in Multi-User mode, find out more about accessing your repository in Multi-User mode.

Browsing the Essential Architecture Manager Repository

Once you have opened your project you will see a set of Tabbed windows

• Instances - the contents of the model, structure according to the meta model
  
• Essential Architecture Reporting - used for publishing the model to the Essential Viewer reporting environment
• Instance Tree - an alternative way of browsing the model contents
• Queries - provides a simple environment for querying the repository
• Script Console - provides a scripting environment for adding updates to Essential Architecture Manager.

You will spend most of your time with Essential Architecture Manager in the Instance tab. When you open it (it is the default tab when you open Essential Architecture Manager), you will see 3 main panels:

• Class Browser - the class hierarchy of the Essential Meta Model which is used to navigate around the repository.
• Instance Browser - the set of instances (elements of your model) that exist in the repository for the selected class.
• Instance Editor - the form for editing the selected instance.

In the Class Browser, open 'EA_Class', and you will see the main layers of the Essential Meta Model.

• Business Layer
• Application Layer
• Information Layer
• Technology Layer
• EA Support
• About Essential

Expand each layer to explore the components and constructs that are available.

The screen shot above shows the business layer expanded to show the conceptual business layer.  In this example you can see entries in the Business Domain instance. Your model will be empty until you have captured some of your organisation's architecture elements.

The EA Support class provides classes that are used by (or are user for or operate on) the core meta model (Business Layer, Application Layer, Information Layer and Technology Layer). This is where classes for supporting processes such as Change Management, Strategy Management can be found.

The screen shot here shows the Utilities tab in the EA Support class expanded. You will see that there are a number of common suppliers pre-loaded into the model.

The About Essential tab provides a copy of the licenses and allows you to view the properties of your Essential Architecture Manager installation, e.g. the version number and any updates that have been applied to it.

The screen shot above shows the About Essential tab expanded and displaying the Essential Architecture Manager License. Now spend some time browsing through the repository by expanding the layers to see the artefacts available.

You are ready move onto the next tutorial, Working with your architecture.