Guidance around using ARCHI with Teams

[darthal]

Hey guys
Really like and appreciate ARCHI and all the effort that has gone into it.

My team is in the process of evaluating different diagraming tools and really enjoy the clean design and functionality ARHI delivers. There are about 15 EAs in our company and we wanted to share diagrams / models amongst different team members.
I was wondering the best way of doing that using ARCHI within a team?

• Are there other plugins that would facilitate better collaboration and sharing of models, I've seen the GIT plugin... "Grafico" are there others?


• How does one use ARCHI effectively across a larger team, are there any pointers you are willing to share?

Thanks for any input.

[Phil Beauvoir]

Hi,

(love the avatar)

welcome to the Archi forums and thanks for the positive words. I think others, and J-B Sarrodie, will be able to comment better in depth. For my own part, this issue is something that we are currently investigating and will improve upon.

Phil

[darthal]

Thanks - from a "StarWars" Geek

Yes, we would be really interested in your guys input / thoughts here. We were also evaluating Sparx-EA but were concerned by it convoluted / bloated feature set ("Jack of all trades, master of none"). Kind of confusing. ARCHI much more focused. 

Cheers

[Jean-Baptiste Sarrodie]

Hi,

I think that there is no perfect solution asof now (that's why Phil says that we are currently investigating).

For the moment you have the following solutions:

• Sharing of models files using a simple fileshare. This is not perfect but this is simple and work well. Only issue is that there is no locking mecanism so if two people open the same model and then save their changes, the latest to save wins.
• Another similar solution than the previous is to rely not on a simple file share but on something that allows you to do check-in/out. For example, with SVN you should solve previous issue. The new issue being that the lock is on the whole model file, which may or may not be an issue depending on the case.
• Grafico is a plugin that solves both issues as it allow model files to be saved (in fact exported) in a way that make them manageable by a modern source code management system like Git. Drawback is that you have to know git as Grafico only manages import and export of the model, not the repository itself, so you have to know git commands (or have a good git client).
• On this forum, Hervé develops and shares a plugin to import/export models to a central repository based on a SGBRD (several supported). This comes with several features like versioning and ability to split/merge models. Only issue IMHO is that there is currently no way to merge multiple changes, so you're back to square one: the latest to save wins.

Another interresting information: if you want to share some common elements/relationships into different models and if views are not needed (i.e. you want to share a common list of services and some nodes, application components, processes....) then you can easily export them in CSV and import this CSV into new models. Another option is to use some model templates in which you have already defined common things.

Regards,

JB

[darthal]

Thanks for the feedback....I'll keep you posted on our progress here. Best Regards