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.