Things we do not like about ARIS Business Architect

adnan shahab on May 23, 2010

(do not forget to put your comments regarding your experience with ARIS modeling aspect) R ead Part 2 of the article here

Please note, this article will be followed by "Things I love about ARIS Business Architect".

"This article is not to undermine the effort put forward by developer team but to improve it." The way around these obstacles is heavy scripting ( more article will be followed on ARIS Scripting hack).

I have worked on numerous modeling tools, following list is compiled based upon out-of-box ARIS Business Architect version 7.1.0.3xxxx.

Number#1: No option to make new folder during assignment

Annoyance number#1 can be described through image below.

I am sure, it happens to you guys several time. You are making new assignment to an object, you have selected name, model type and suddenly you realize there is no folder created for the object. Then you take a long sigh, close the assignment wizard and go to explorer to create new folder.

Number#2: Setting initial scaling size to other than 100 in Web Export Profile

I have no idea why after going through all the edit options for profiles, ARIS refuses to set the default initial scale other than 100. It would be much better, to make it more dynamic, at the time of publishing, ARIS BA should set the zoom size of each page individually based upon the default zoom factor of the models.

This have been tested numerous time but somehow ARIS sticks to 100 initial value.

Number#3: No way to arrange object alphabatically on model

There is no way to arrange object alpabatically on the models. It's need some scripting to do this but in my opinion users should not be deprived of this feature (in scripting article we will cover how to playaround with object orientation and set it on pre-defined sequences).

Number#4: Absence of Tab management

Your windows will be crowded after your open 4-5 models (big name models). Scratch your head as there is no mechanism to arrange tabs. You have to live with this law. "TABS ARE FIXED AND STATIC." This law is good, if you are working on one model, and I am sure most of you do not just open and work on one model. Why ARIS cannot shorten the tab size when it's crowded? cannot answer this.

Number#5: No SAVE OR SAVE ALL when you right click on Tabs

Why cannot they also put Save and Close All option? Yeah I know you can do this with File--> Save All but here we are talking about right-click option on Model tabs.

...continued.... Read Part 2 of article here

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7 Replies

Sebastian Stein on May 26, 2010

Hi Adnan,

thanks for providing us such detailed feedback. We have seen your feedback and will react on it. Currently, some of the responsible people for such user feedback are travelling, but I'm sure they will come back to you next week or the week after.

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adnan shahab Author on May 26, 2010
@ Dr. Sebastian Stein

Yes sure. Do forward them these articles to concerned people.

ARIS has many ... many...many... good features as compared with the others (do not worry I will list them one by one) and regarding article about "Things we love about ARIS" , it's half done and i will post it soon.

One thing more, could you please convey this message to web-master:

If possible use CKEditor als known as FCKEditor for inline editing of post.

Only for the author, enable "Revision Tab" on the post along with Diff module.

Sometime we want to save article but also do not want to make it visible to the users. We should be able to select status of post (published/unpublished).

Why not use Book Module? Some time article gets too long and we have to break it into series of separate pages. Book Module allows to create child pages within parent page.
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Sebastian Stein on May 26, 2010

Hi Adnan,

we use CKEditor for inline editing. We didn't enable revisions or the possibility to hide articles (keeping them unpublished) to simplify the user interface as much as possible. We know this might be not convenient for power users, but it will help entry users to post, too. The same for books. We decided that everything should be on a single page instead of spreading posts among several pages. Usually, this is done to increase the number of hits on a page, but as we don't show ads on our page, we don't have to care about increasing hits.

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adnan shahab Author on May 26, 2010

Thanks for clarification. I assume you guys are using STRIP-DOWN version of FCKEditor may be because security reason (SQL code injects threat) or performance issues....quite understandable.

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Sabine Norek on May 28, 2010

Hi Adnan,

I agree with you concerning number 1 and 5 and several other points in part 2 and 3 of your article (see my comments to these articles).

I have talked to the Development Manager of ARIS Business Architect today and we will check, if we can do something about this in one of our next releases.

#2: I forwarded this to the ARIS Business Publisher team.

#3: Would the following workaround help you?:

1. Right-click in the model background and select "Go to"/"Occurrence in Explorer" in the context menu.

2. Click on the tab "Occurrences" on the right hand side of the "Explorer" screen.

3. Sort the objects by name by clicking on the table header of the "Name" column.

4. Select all objects and copy them, e.g. by pressing CTRL+C.

5. Go to the module "Designer" and paste the objects, e.g. by pressing CTRL+V.

6. Keep these objects selected and click on "Arrange/Part layout" in the main menu.

#4: When we first shortened the tabs a couple of releases ago, customers complained about technical problems and that they always need to see the whole name of all open models on the tab, because the names offen differ only at the end. That's why we introduced the list as the last element in the tab row. Clicking on this list icon always gives you an overview of all open models.

Still, I can see your point about arranging the tabs. I'll make sure that we have this requirement on our list.

Best regards

Sabine

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adnan shahab Author on May 29, 2010

Thanks for your feedback Sabine.

#3: Exactly followed your tip/instruction; this is the output i get:

can you see my point? it's like "LINE" arrangement, no Square or Rectangle arrangement. Tested it several time same output. Output should be closed to like this:

#4: we frequently use "List" to navigate around tabs; but ARIS users should be able to re-arrange Tabs.

thanks.

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Sabine Norek on May 30, 2010 as Reply to Sergei Real-Picture

Hi Adnan,

thanks for clarifying.

#3: I can see why you want the square layout. I think this is related to #8 in the second part of your article. And yes, this has been added to requirements already. For the time being, you could copy the objects from ARIS Explorer first to a text editor and second to ARIS Designer. In this case, the square layout is applied. This is a bit too complicated, I know, but at least a workaround for now.

#4: Yes, re-arranging tabs is already granted as a valid requirement.

Best regards

Sabine

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