Integration between Microsoft Visio 2016 and Aris

Hello,

first: I would not "rely" on the import feature. It is not a wise strategy to treat Visio as a "remote data capture client" for ARIS on a regular basis.

• You have to configure the mapping from your Visio stencils to ARIS symbols
• The connections you draw in Visio must be logically connected to the stencils, so the import can recognize them and for every pair of connected stencil types you can configure only one connection type
• you have to be sure that you adhere painstakingly to the method in the target model types in ARIS

Hence: Since Visio is not a modelling tool there is a lot that can go wrong in interpreting the Visio files, although they may look okay to a human reader. Testing the import with a few diagrams of each type is a good idea, so you get the configuration right. In the end you have to do a quality check for 100% of the imported models. Also test what happens, when you have the same real-world object on multiple diagrams. Very likely the goal is, that you get only a single definition of the object in ARIS, but for the import every diagram is a new world with new objects. So there is going to be some consolidation work after the import. You save this work, if you model directly in ARIS, because ARIS will offer you existing objects for reuse straight away as you place them in a model.

I hope these considerations help you decide which way to go.

Dear Hussein,

Why don't you use ARIS Advanced on ARIS Cloud to model your customer's models. That would not only skip the modeling work in Visio including the import into ARIS, it also would ensure that from the beginning on your are 100% compatible as the ARIS method in ARIS Enterprise is identical.

Cheers
Runè

Hi Rune,

the statement regarding the method depends on whether their customer has customized his method. That is not uncommon. But I agree that it is worth a try. I think there is a 1-month-trial they could use to validate the idea.

Cheers,

 M. Zschuckelt

Thank you for sharing these helpful considerations, they really helped me in shaping the difficulties that we would face with the merge feature. I am sharing my reply as an attached image since it's being considered as spam.

Thank you Rune, will absolutely check it out.

Hello,

indeed, the primary use-case for the Visio import is for customers that start with ARIS and have a legacy of hundreds or thousands of Visio diagrams that they maintained in the past and now they want to migrate them once as a start for proper modelling. The issues with Visio stencils are:

• They do not have an identity, so there is no telling whether two stencils of the same type that bear the same caption are supposed to represent an identical real-world object.
• There is no "standard" mapping of Visio stencils to modelling concepts such as a process step, a role or whatever other type you may have represented in Visio. Every Visio user defines his own conventions. Particularly with BPMN symbols Visio users tend to be very creative how to compose them. I have met customers who used "grouping" of stencils to compose the various task or gateway types with their supplementary type indicators. This is very hard to interpret, when you look at the XML format of Visio, as the connections only connect to one of the component stencils, but not to the group. The group itself does not have a type you could map and the type of the connected stencil is not the detailed type you would like to map.
• With Visio you can draw lines in "thin air", which is not possible in ARIS. Connections in ARIS always connect exactly two objects. When you select connections in Visio you may come across lines, where the end-points are not marked with the big red square but only with the green markers you also have at corner points. This indicates that the line is not logically connected to a connection anchor of the stencil, even if the user tried hard to make it look like it. In this case the reader of the XML Visio file has no way of telling which stencil the connection was intended to be connected to and the import will just have to drop the connection.
• Particularly if you are modelling an IT infrastructure you will have situations where two application systems are connected in multiple ways. The only information you can extract from the Visio diagram is, that the stencils A and B, both of type T are connected. In the import template you have to decide once and for all, what the logic of a connection between two objects of type T is. In the modelling tool you may choose the connection logic each time you create a connection.
• The direction of a connection is important. If you have a connection type "transmits data to" between two applications it makes a difference which way the data flows. In Visio it is very easy to draw a connection and decorate its ends with arrow tips afterwards no matter which way you drew the connection. So the logical direction of the connection represented by its decoration may be just the opposite of what you will find in the Visio file. This is something Visio users most probably will not care about as long as the graphic output looks okay. But the modelling tool will look at the direction of the connection as it was drawn.

These are some of the main differences between a drawing tool like Visio and a modelling tool like ARIS. And I hope it has become clear, why Visio drawings cannot be as precise as a model created with a modelling tool, where you can only create things that "make sense" according to your modelling method and purpose.

Hello,

when you start your tests with ARIS Advanced you should ask your customer to give you his ARIS method filter. You can import that into ARIS Advanced and this way you will have all method customizations of your customer in your instance of ARIS Advanced. You can either regularly export a database backup from Advanced and deliver it to your customer. Then you would have to tell him, which models are ready for merging to the customer's database - or you only export the models you are done with and deliver those export files to the customer, so the customer can import that. You should negotiate with the customer, if he wants to export some extracts of data to your environment as well, so you have a library of the customer's objects to use and work with in your modelling effort. This will further reduce consolidation efforts when your deliverables are to be integrated into the customer's modelling environment.

In case you use the export feature you have to familiarize yourself with the export options, because in this case you take responsibility for the correct excerpt of the database.

Hi Hussein,

my name is Fabian Moosmann, and I support ARIS partner around the globe.

I can show you some concrete possibilities how you can practically carry on here. I suggest that we have an sync call. But let's move to email: You can reach me via fabian.moosmann@softwareag.com.