Share

"One of the essential ingredients for successful team based development is a method commonly understood and shared repository of model elements and designs. Without this resource, communication suffers and productivity falls. Enterprise Architect is the ideal tool to give your team the information and capabilities they need, when they need them."

Many tools promise to provide the project team with this level of shared vision, but only Enterprise Architect offers both the capability and the price to truly provide a complete solution for the analysis, requirements, development, test, maintenance, delivery and project management teams working toward a shared goal. Coupled with this, Enterprise Architect also offers high quality document generation tools and a free "Viewer" edition to further extend the team reach.

Whether your team is situated in a single environment, dispersed throughout an organization or even distributed across the globe, Enterprise Architect has the capability to provide the necessary sharing of information amongst team members - keeping all up to date and fully aware of changing requirements and design decisions.

By allowing Test cases, Maintenance Issues, Changes, Resourcing, Risk, Defects and other common project management and quality control attributes to be attached directly to model elements, EA also provides the whole team with a complete understanding of how work is progressing and how schedules are being met. All this at no extra cost, and with no additional plug-ins or tools required.

Physical project sharing can be realized in several ways, including network deployment, replication, XMI import/export, version control, package control.

Some typical scenarios include:

DBMS Repository Support

Many popular DBMS systems such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and Firebird are supported - giving Enterprise Architect the capability to scale up to very large shared repositories hosted on a network LAN or WAN.

XMI export/import

XMI export/import support between Enterprise Architect models and models produced by other UML modeling tools. Users can share model content between models by exporting their model content to an XMI file, which can then be imported to another EA model.

Version control

XMI export/import using CVS or SCC compliant tools. Users can collectively share model content in XMI format automatically, thereby allowing the tracking and recording model versions.

Shared Model (.EAP/.EAPX/.FEAP File)

The Professional and Corporate versions of Enterprise Architect let you place an EAP, EAPX or FEAP file on a shared network drive and have small teams concurrently log on and work within the model. This is a simple and fast mechanism for getting the team up and running with their common vision. If the model or team grows large, then the same model can be easily migrated to a DBMS server based environment.

Model replication

Replication is a simple process which allows for data interchange between .EAP based repositories (not DBMS) and is suitable for use in situations where many different users work independently. Modelers merge their changes into a Design Master on an "as required basis". With replication it is recommended that a backup is carried out prior to replication. Replication requires the use .EAP based repositories, and cannot be performed on repositories stored on a DBMS server.

User security

User security provides the ability to control the access and modification of model portions based on user login. For the most comprehensive sharing needs.

For more information about deploying and using Enterprise Architect for team use, please refer to the Deployment of Enterprise Architect white paper.