ARIS Connect Person Responsible vs. "Follow" the model

Hi Radek,

In case, you have to follow these models to see the comentaries.. do a test start to follow the model and will see the comentaries in your feed. Usually also is the same to user group for collaboration as well.

I suggest you to create a brainstorm in Empower portal regarding this needed behavior and our RD could make available for future releases.

BR
AO

There is a database setting by which you can make all persons responsible automatically follow their models. In Connect Administration go to Configuration -> Collaboration -> Configure database.

For each database you can specify a time of day at which the synchronization between person responsible and Following state will be done (or never).

Hello Andre,
thank you for your suggestions. This is what I had to do in the end. My procedure was following:
1. set person responsible in Client for all our models on the current project = 130+ models (can be done in batch multiple ways)
2. go to Connect and ask each person responsible to go one-by-one again and click "Follow" on each respective model that he/she is responsible for
3. create the group for each area of the modelling, each group would focus on around 30-40 models
4. go to group setup and add again one-by-one the models for each group.

During step 4 I was already using words that cannot be published on this forum, clicking again and again, plus waiting for slow refresh in the Connect was not pleasant.

I have also learnt a hard way that Group is actually not following the Model, but the Feed. The consequence of this design is massive, in case the model is not followed by anybody (yet) or nobody has raised any comment (yet), there is no Feed, so group cannot follow it.

For users it is different, the mechanism uses the "Follow" button on each model and by clicking it the Feed is created and then it is followed by User. The slowness of this initial feed creation would be another topic, but then it works.

Overall the concept of single person responsible on the Client side without possiblity to assign it already in Client to Group instead, creates a chain of problems later on. Also the fact that Feed is created only after first Follower/Comment added, made us a really hard time during the review process.

Hello M.Zschuckelt,
I know about this setting, but thank you for raising this as only now I have started thinking about it from different angle. Yes indeed, our DB has been setup for this "person in charge" synchronization already earlier. I just had to remember that the "person in charge" = "person responsible", any reason for different naming in this DB admin area?
Anyway, yes indeed this configuration and design is the key for our problem.

Steps:
1. Process Modeler creates new model in Client
2. Process Modeler enters person responsible for new model
3. Process Reviewer enters a new comment against the model in Connect
4. At 00:00 CET the synchronization of "person in charge" executes

... in such case Person Responsible is NOT notified via email. However it gets all even more nasty as some comments could have been entered AFTER the synchronization in step 4 and such comments would be notified via email as expected. So the process owner gets false assumption that he/she got ALL the notifications.

In our case we have found that some of the questions were not detected for 3+ weeks after their entry. And we have found it only by accident. Of course it has put the team of process owners into difficult situation as ARIS Connect was considered by reviewers as unreliable for the the review purposes. We have saved the situation, but a lot of manual effort has been spent.

Generally it would not come to our minds that all the changes you do in Client you see immediately in Connect (which is massive improvement from the old times of ARIS publishing e.g. in version 7.1), but the person responsible, even if visible as filled attribute in Connect, actually may not mean much from the Collaboration perspective.

We have tried to run the synchronization manually, ad hoc from the screen you have mentioned. The "three squares" animation has initiated showing the progress, but even after several hours it has not stopped. Therefore it is hard to say if it failed/completed/has not even started. In our case it worked and synchronized the person responsible so all notifications would go to via email, but no idea when it got completed, so it cannot be used on the daily basis. I had to log-out and log-in to Connect to get rid of that animation.

Hello Radek,

I understand. I would suggest to consider a workflow for your purposes. The simplest possible option is the built-in "Request approval" workflow. This would bring the model to the attention of the person responsible immediately when the modeller requests it.

If you need to have a larger audience of reviewers have their say, you could consider a custom workflow meeting your needs.

I did not quite understand, if you are publishing the "Workspace" in the portal or the "Latest version". With the "Latest version" you might have the problem that the person responsible and any reviewers cannot see the new version, because they might not have Designer licence seats. With "Workspace" publishing consumers will see content that is not finalized. The way to go in this dilemma is a second database and a customized workflow, where you have reviewers and owners review content in a "Development" database and have the workflow transfer the content to a "Published" database, once it is approved. The advantage you gain with this concept is that Collaboration threads in the Development database don't show up to the broad public.