Author Topic: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities  (Read 7518 times)

jack89

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[EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« on: January 20, 2022, 08:02:24 pm »
Hi all,

I noticed that Enterprise Architect 16 will have a lot of improvements related to a teamwork environment. On the official site we can read "New and expanded collaborative tools support a rich, co-operative team based approach to modeling".

We are using Lemontree in order to work in team on EA (uploading the eapx model on bitbucket repo), but it is a little bit struggling.

My question for you, community is: is there any way to work in team more efficiently with ea? I mean: is there any tool that allows multiple user to work simultaneously on EAPX online? Have you some positive feedback about other team work environment setup? Which is the software that is mentioned in the previous reported slogan on the website?

Thank you in advance!

Ian Mitchell

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #1 on: January 20, 2022, 09:16:49 pm »
I thought the EAP and EAPX repositories are essentially single-user reps, which happen to support multiple users - sometimes, and with risks attached? I never recommend shared EAPX - to much risk of bad things happening. And why would you, given that there are free, proper multi-user DBMSs.
Ian Mitchell, Designer, eaDocX


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www.theartfulmodeller.com

jack89

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #2 on: January 20, 2022, 11:03:55 pm »
I thought the EAP and EAPX repositories are essentially single-user reps, which happen to support multiple users - sometimes, and with risks attached? I never recommend shared EAPX - to much risk of bad things happening. And why would you, given that there are free, proper multi-user DBMSs.

Thank you! How about prolaborate?

Ian Mitchell

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #3 on: January 20, 2022, 11:13:00 pm »
'How about Prolaborate' is a bit vague.
If you want normal humans (that is, non-modellers) to get involved with what you're modelling, Prolaborate is the base way to do that. Show them stuff they understand, in a way they can access easily.
Or generate them some documents (with eaDocX, of course).
Ian Mitchell, Designer, eaDocX


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www.theartfulmodeller.com

jack89

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #4 on: January 21, 2022, 12:55:15 am »
'How about Prolaborate' is a bit vague.
If you want normal humans (that is, non-modellers) to get involved with what you're modelling, Prolaborate is the base way to do that. Show them stuff they understand, in a way they can access easily.
Or generate them some documents (with eaDocX, of course).

How about to use prolaborate in a large team work environment? (20 modelers with simultaneous access). I would like to know which software sparx is referring in his slogan to EA 16.

Geert Bellekens

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #5 on: January 21, 2022, 03:10:21 am »
I wouldn't get too excited about these announcements.
Usually that means they improved some of the existing collaboration tools such as chat, reviews, in-model mail, etc...
(none of which I or any of my clients use)

If you setup a central database you can perfectly work with 20 or more modellers on the same model.
Use a terminal solution (citrix, WVD, RDS) if the performance of connecting the EA client to the database is an issue

If you need version control you can add that on top of it. It works fine if you structure your model into small enough packages, and you don't need the ability to merge different feature branches.

If you need the latter, you'll need Lemontree as this is the only tool that supports merging for EA models.

Geert

Michael Mangelschots

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #6 on: February 21, 2022, 10:08:54 pm »
...
Use a terminal solution (citrix, WVD, RDS) if the performance of connecting the EA client to the database is an issue
...

We switched from direct database access to the Pro Cloud Server connection and remote connections performance (for example from home) increased dramatically. I can highly recommend it.
This also allowed us to limit database access to only the PCS service account, which increases security considerably.

timoc

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #7 on: February 23, 2022, 07:52:04 pm »
...
Use a terminal solution (citrix, WVD, RDS) if the performance of connecting the EA client to the database is an issue
...

We switched from direct database access to the Pro Cloud Server connection and remote connections performance (for example from home) increased dramatically. I can highly recommend it.
This also allowed us to limit database access to only the PCS service account, which increases security considerably.
I recommend the free PCS too. Its fiddly to setup, but once done, the PCS can be used to serve EAP and EAPX files to a team. This is also how i get around the problems with giving multiple users access to EAP files stored on sharepoint, NFS or similar.

wivel

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #8 on: February 23, 2022, 09:44:56 pm »
I thought the EAP and EAPX repositories are essentially single-user reps, which happen to support multiple users - sometimes, and with risks attached? I never recommend shared EAPX - to much risk of bad things happening. And why would you, given that there are free, proper multi-user DBMSs.

In larger organisations, getting a proper database for EA can be quite a hassle, in my experience, especially if EA is used only as a project tool and not a strategic tool. I have in many cases been denied dedicated EA model databases, since there is no EA product owner and strategy for EA use in the organisation. Installing your own database in these scenarios, is a no-go too.

In these cases our only option was using an EAPX model on a fileshare and doing versioning and baselining by simply making a copy of the EAPX file with the baseline/version date.

Henrik

steen.jensen

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #9 on: February 25, 2022, 10:47:29 pm »
When in large organisation as we (Region Stockholm >50.000 employees) we are using a sharedDatabase platform (MS SQL based DB-Hotell) for the reasoning to avoid any SQL-server administration and  costs.
Its about 20% slover than an own MS-SQL Server but 10% of the cost & maintance effort
It about 75 architects using EA-Repo in this environment

timoc

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #10 on: February 26, 2022, 01:45:52 am »
I thought the EAP and EAPX repositories are essentially single-user reps, which happen to support multiple users - sometimes, and with risks attached? I never recommend shared EAPX - to much risk of bad things happening. And why would you, given that there are free, proper multi-user DBMSs.

In larger organisations, getting a proper database for EA can be quite a hassle, in my experience, especially if EA is used only as a project tool and not a strategic tool. I have in many cases been denied dedicated EA model databases, since there is no EA product owner and strategy for EA use in the organisation. Installing your own database in these scenarios, is a no-go too.

In these cases our only option was using an EAPX model on a fileshare and doing versioning and baselining by simply making a copy of the EAPX file with the baseline/version date.

Henrik
This is the kind of setup that made me look at PCS server in the first place. Running PCS to serve locally (from a my desktop) and using it as the single point of access to manage the teams access to EAPs, rather than relying on fileshare. Sharepoint for example has a horrible habit of forking the eap files if it gets confused for any reason, littering the model folder with "model-hostname" versions of the model file.

wivel

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Re: [EA 16] - work in team cababilities
« Reply #11 on: February 26, 2022, 05:01:54 am »
This is the kind of setup that made me look at PCS server in the first place. Running PCS to serve locally (from a my desktop) and using it as the single point of access to manage the teams access to EAPs, rather than relying on fileshare. Sharepoint for example has a horrible habit of forking the eap files if it gets confused for any reason, littering the model folder with "model-hostname" versions of the model file.

Also a no-go in many larger organisations, since installing software yourself usually is not possible. Also running a 'uncontrolled' webserver on a client will not be allowed for e.g. security reasons. But a really god idea. Never had much success with sharepoint and EAPX files either.

Henrik