Hi All,
Does anyone know whether there is equivalent anonymous access in the Connect product, as there is in the Business Publisher product?
My client has an existing ARIS 7.2 landscape and is looking to upgrade to 9.6, but due to the size of the user base that needs access to view the content it is preferable to allow view only users to access the content anonymously. Of course, the alternative is to look at LDAP integration, but that introduces a maintenance and support overhead (users forgetting PWs, etc) that we'd like to avoid.
If anonymous access is not possible, can any one confirm whether the Connect Viewer licence model is a concurrent user model (i.e. we can have thousands of uses in the system but only, say, 200 can access the content simultaneously, with us having procured 200 Connect Viewer licences) or whether each user requiring view access will require a named connect viewer licence, requiring significant investment in viewer licences?
Many Thanks,
Ben
Hello Ben,
This feature is missing in ARIS 9.6 Connect :-( This is also i guess why SAG has decided to have now a named user and concurrent user model.
So with named user model, you need to assign license to each individual using UCM and it stops when no more licenses are available in your "license store", and for concurrent you can assign licenses to more users than what you have actually but ARIS will limit the number of connected users. But the two models have obviously different price tags.
For the LDAP integration (or AD), I would recommend to use it as this is the major point of the collaboration feature of ARIS Connect - having anonymous comments will not help. Be careful if you are using the LDAP import because if you miss setting a filter (and the dialog is not very obvious), it very quickly import the entire LDAP of your company (I have experienced this and I had 20.000+ users in ARIS)
LDAP integration if existing in your company (minimum windows login) will not bring overhead as you do not have to maintain users in different DB anymore as users are centrally maintained in UCM and ARIS uses LDAP features for access. So it is actually very simple.
If you want some additional info on some ideas around usage for ARIS Connect, send me a email to tanguy@tpconsulting.be, I could give you some insigths on experience we have had at different customers.
Cheers
Tanguy
Tue, 07/08/2014 - 13:22
Dear Ben,
ARIS Connect from its principles is not meant to replace ARIS Publisher 1:1. It's a different approach to reach out for new target groups. Moreover, an anonymous login like Publisher offers, would contradict Connect's collaborative approach.
Publisher offers a simple way to consume process models anonymously. But only Connect lets users comment or request changes on the model context without leaving the product. That's more advanced and reflect a modern approach of communication on the context.
Here's a comparison of the capabilities of ARIS Publisher and ARIS Connect:
Thank you, both, for your prompt feedback.
I think the problem here is that my client's solution needs to cater for both target groups that Rune mentions. There is a large end user base, the majority of which will only consume the information, i.e. refer to 'released' versions of the process models for information on the processes / steps their organisational role is responsible for. Let's call these users 'consuming' users..
Whilst it might become more appropriate in the future, as the level of engagement increases and a true business process driven community is established throughout the full workforce, at present it is not required that these 'consuming' users have the ability to comment, collaborate or initiate change requests for the content. There will be a smaller community, consisting of the business processes owners, key users and stakeholders, that will require the ability to collaborate on how the processes need to evolve to continue to meets the business needs. I accept that this community will need to have access to the collaboration features and will therefore require full connect viewer licencing, and/or designer licences where required.
As there is no anonymous access in Connect, I would assume that each of these 'consuming' users will need a full connect viewer licence, either as part of the concurrent or named user model (concurrent preferred, otherwise licence management / assignment to users would become a challenge unless thousands of named licences are purchased), but as I understand it the concurrent user licences are far more expensive. The access to the collaboration functions could then (potentially) be restricted by user permissions (function privileges) in user administration. The problem here is that my client would be paying for collaboration features that the majority of the user base wouldn't use, which wouldn't be desirable. Ideally, the middle ground would be a 'Connect Lite' user, or similar, with 'view only' privilages and a consequently different pricing structure (I am not aware that such exists).
The only other option I can think of is to run ARIS Connect and Publisher alongside - Connect providing the collaboration features to enable efficient process design / evolution that would be used by the process owners, key users and stakeholders and Publisher providing the 'consuming' user community with a means to access the data they need. However, there are cost implications for this (licence, maintenance and ongoing support of a more complex landscape) and to me it seems like an inelegant solution.
Does anyone have any experience on how similar requirements have been achieved, or in running both Connect and Publisher 9.x alongside each other?
Thanks,
Ben
