Hi,
I recently used Aris Express in a project, and in general the experience was very good.. have some ideas for improvements that I'd like to share. I answered the Aris Express survey, but I thought it might be interesting to discuss ideas here as well, and perhaps I have overlooked functionality that is already there?. Anyway, here is my wish-list:
- BPMN support (I know it's coming)
- Swimlanes. I understand this should come with BPMN as well (also for EPC diagrams, right?). For now, I've used the solution suggested in the forum - using large activity objects with a different color as swimlanes. One problem with that is that you have to use "group" functionality to attach role objects to the swimlane, but this is probably a bug?
- Relative paths when linking models (so that you can easily distribute a set of models containing links)
- User-defines properties
- Auto-numbering of objects (some people want this as a way to refer to model objects from external documents)
- Improved auto layout/alignment capabilities. Especially, the "center" functionality would be easier to use if you could center all selected objects with respect to the one selected first - some other tools have this. Also, the auto routing of connections should be improved.
- Easier way to indicate that an activity is linked to a "sub process". I usually show the link attribute and resize, so that only the icon is visible, but I would like a simpler way to do this.
- The fragment functionality is a great idea, but how can I reuse my fragments across models?
I understand that I can't expect to get everything in a free tool though :-).
Jon.
